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Somewhere that had nothing to do with him. This space was meant to be hers and she’d all but invited him inside and asked him to throw darts at her.
    It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t her life be fair for a change? She’d given up years of it for his career. She’d helped put him through that last year of school, the year his parents died and their account (and subsequently his college funding) had been frozen.
    She’d dropped out herself to work two jobs so that he could start his business and had then traveled all over the world with him so that he could work with the pop opera group and feel “fulfilled.” She had put off having children because he wasn’t ready, let her massage license expire so that he could have someone at home, kept the house clean, hired the maintenance workers, kept his records and balanced the checkbook, hid her magic and–
    Liza, in the midst of her depressing and angry march down Memory Lane had not counted on the fact that the house could read her thoughts. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
    Before she’d finished her last thought, two things happened at once:
    The front door swung open from the pressure of a hearty knock…
    And two of the foreign Coca-Cola bottles sailed off the shelf on the other side of the room, hovered dramatically in the air before proceeding to spin around uncontrollably, and then crashed to the ground, showering the living room with a thousand glittery shards of glass.
    Liza, hand covering her mouth in embarrassment, was left staring at her visitor in shock.
    “Um, hi?”
    The curly-haired brunette holding a corning ware dish covered in aluminum foil gave her a baffled grin. “I’m your neighbor from the next farm over. Um, welcome to Kudzu Valley?”
     

Chapter Three
     
    STILL EMBARASSED at her emotional display back at the house, Liza stomped through the library’s double doors and exhaled loudly. Several people sitting in rocking chairs grouped together around the magazine stand glanced up at her from their periodicals, disgruntled.
    “Sorry,” she whispered.
    It was obvious to Liza that Jessie Shelby, twentysomething housewife and casserole making extraordinaire, had tried to ignore the fact that she’d just seen her new neighbor make glass bottles dance around in the air and then crash to the floor using nothing but her mind. She’d chatted casually about the weather, asked about her mother, mentioned the new coffee shop going in downtown and had politely inquired about Liza’s business venture.
    In the end, though, after she’d patiently followed her into the kitchen and watched Liza place the broccoli and cheese casserole (topped with crumbled potato chips) in her refrigerator, Jessie just couldn’t help herself. 
    “Did I just see you–“
    Liza had mumbled some unintelligible reply without turning around but Jessie accepted the answer for what it was–confirmation.  She knew better than to lie, although her younger self might have made something up to change the subject.
    Jessie waited a beat and then continued her line of questioning. “Does that mean you’re a–“
    “Yes.”
    The awkward silence that followed was only interrupted by the old-fashioned clock on the wall, ticking away the minutes that seemed to stretch on forever. Liza continued to root around in the refrigerator while the other woman studied her from behind. She could all but feel the questions building in Jessie’s mind, but a combination of fear and southern respect kept them at bay.
    Liza sighed inside, disappointed in herself for making the other woman uncomfortable. She wasn’t ashamed of being a witch, she’d never hurt anyone on purpose, and she’d just moved from an area that actually focused part of its tourism campaign on witchcraft. But the words her mother had told her the morning she set out for Kentucky still rang in her ear.
    “Don’t be talking about any of that stuff you can do,” Mabel had warned her. “You just don’t know how