I scrambled to think of what I’d meant to ask her. “There are stores—you know, online—that sell most of this stuff.”

“I don’t want to buy it online, and nobody else does either.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I don’t know the people selling it,” she said flatly. “I have no idea what they intended when they cultivated the plants.”

“Is that important? The intent of the person handling them?”

“More than anything.” She glanced at the wall of glass jars, then set her hands on the counter, leaning in. “I read a study once. It said that if you have a plant and talk to it like you love it, it’ll grow faster, bigger. But if you keep a plant and talk down to it, insult it, it will wither and die.”

“That’s true,” I said. I’d read the same article and had even done an entire paper on the process for my environmental studies class. “So maybe there’s something to it, to what you think and feel when you grow a plant.”

She nodded. “I think so. I imagine plants are kind of like people. Tell a person they’re worthless, hurt their feelings everyday—they’d wither, too.” She let her delicate fingers dance over the surface of the counter, then up to her lips. Her eyes were like the centers of Velvet Queen sunflowers, brown and blazing. She held my gaze. “But imagine telling someone they’re beautiful, magnetic, stunning. Every single day. Imagine how they’d flourish.”

I knocked over the jar of comfrey as I shuffled papers, trying to avoid her stare.

Marie straightened, a smirk on her lips. “Anyway, the plants and herbs here are just better. They stay fresh longer. They don’t rot in their containers. Why do you think that is?”

“I—I don’t know,” I lied. I was beginning to get some idea.

“You’re new to this place, but it isn’t new to you,” Marie said. “It’s in your bones. It’s part of who are.”

I couldn’t look straight at her because I didn’t know where my gaze would land—her wide eyes? The full curve of her bottom lip? “How do you know that it’s in my bones?”

“I know a lot of things,” she said. “For example, there are paper bags under the counter. And there should be a scoop and scale under there, too.”

I looked down. She was right.

“I’ll take eight ounces of the comfrey,” she said.

“Right.” I took the lid off the jar. The species was Symphytum officinale. “This kind of comfrey is called common comfrey. It’s good, but the Russian strain, Symphytum uplandicum, would be better for Alec’s ulcers. The alkaloid content is higher in that strain.”

I raised my head to look at Marie. Her eyebrow arched, her mouth a half smile. I quickly scooped the dried comfrey leaves onto the scale, measured out eight ounces, and then dumped them into a paper bag. In the drawer to my right, I found a sheet of small black stickers and used one to seal the bag. I handed it to Marie and she pushed a twenty-dollar bill across the counter.

“I can’t take that,” I said.

“Why? It’s what I paid Circe.”

“When?” I asked. “Everybody keeps telling me this place has been closed for a long time.”

“A while ago.” She pushed the money closer to me. “You got bills to pay, right? I really hope you reopen the apothecary. This place is more important to people than you can imagine.”

She’d sidestepped my question about when she’d paid Circe like I hadn’t even asked it. Something lingered in her words, some other meaning. This place.

Marie leaned forward, rolling the beads of her necklace between her fingers. Her nails were painted fire-engine red, and a moss-colored agate in the shape of a skull adorned her middle finger. “This has been passed down through my family for generations. You see the beads? Do you know what they’re made from?”

I leaned in to take a closer look at the necklace. She gently bit her bottom lip and sighed. The warmth of her breath and the closeness of her face to mine lit a fire in me. I blinked away the thoughts and I tried to refocus on the necklace.

What appeared to be wooden beads were, in fact, black and red seeds, dried and drilled straight through the middle.

“They’re Abrus precatorious,” I said. “Rosary peas.”

She strummed her fingers on the counter. “Harmless in this form—”

“Deadly to cultivate.”

“Exactly.”

Circe had known, or at least suspected, that I was immune, and I began to wonder if she had an even deeper understanding of this mysterious gift than I thought.

“Circe replaced them for me over the years,” Marie said. “See these ones?” She touched two cracked and flaking seeds near the clasp. “Maybe you can fix them for me now that she’s gone.”

The jar labeled Abrus Precatorious was empty, but she probably knew that. She wasn’t asking me to climb the ladder—she wanted me to grow them for her.

“I’ll pay you a hundred dollars a seed,” Marie said.

The door of the apothecary bounced open. Mom and Mo fell headfirst into the room. Mo practically did a full barrel roll, then jumped up and stood at the doorway.

“I was just—just checking these door jambs,” she stammered, rubbing her shoulder. “The jambs are loose. And the hinges are—are broke. We gotta get that fixed.” She ran her hand over the jamb like she was inspecting it, then turned to Mom. “Babe, can you call somebody to fix this?”

Mom took out her phone and put it to her ear. Without unlocking it. Or dialing a number. She pretended to talk to someone and then paused, shoving her phone back in her pocket.

“We were eavesdropping,” Mom admitted. “Sorry. We’ll leave y’all alone.”

They stumbled out of the room and closed the door—which worked perfectly—behind them.

I sighed. “They’re a whole mess.”

Marie laughed as she pulled out her phone. “What’s your number?”

“You want my number?” I asked.

“Yes.” She said it with zero hesitation.

It took me a second to actually remember my own damn phone number. I needed to get it together because I was embarrassing myself. After rattling off the numbers, she sent me a text so I had her info.