It took him a while to get to sleep, and he slept later than usual the next morning. He sighed when he saw the spellbook on his bedside table again, and firmly resolved not to touch it. When he didn’t see Monica in the living room or kitchen, he assumed she’d also had trouble sleeping and was still in bed. Until, going back down the hall to use the restroom, he saw that her bedroom door was open. After he used the toilet, he went to her room. She wasn’t there, but there was a folded note lying on the bedside table.

Dear Elijah,

I heard you and Casey talking last night. I couldn’t make out much of what you said, and I tried not to listen, but I heard enough to know you were talking about magic. That’s enough. I’m going home as soon as there’s enough light to drive safely. Your engagement ring is here on the bedside table.

– Monica

Her engagement ring was there under the note.

Numbly, he went to the front door and opened it. Monica’s car was gone.

He rushed to the phone in the kitchen and tried to call Monica’s cellphone number, but it went to voicemail after a few rings. Then he groaned, remembering her phone was still lying in the leaf litter beside the trail at Emerald Outback. He’d need to go get it today and mail it to her. He’d have to allow her time to get home, then call one of her parents’ cellphones and ask to speak to her… or send her an email or a private message on social media. He’d fallen out of the habit of checking his socials as often as he used to, with the slow Internet access in the first few weeks and the myriad of tempting books to fill his idle moments – not to mention studying magic.

He realized that he was still holding the note and the engagement ring. After staring dazedly at it for a minute or two, he picked it up and went to his room, putting the ring away in an inside zippered pocket of his suitcase. He’d have to go back to Greensboro to return it to the jewelry store… but he’d much rather put it on Monica’s finger again after making up with her. If she would listen.

He went back to the kitchen and finished fixing breakfast, but he couldn’t taste much of it. He kept thinking about the argument with Monica last night, and about the engagement ring. He re-read her note until the words didn’t make any sense.

After he rinsed off his dishes and put them in the dishwasher, he decided he would go to Emerald Outback for Monica’s phone after church. While he was getting ready, he put a change of hiking clothes aside to take with him; he could change in the men’s room after the service.

Casey got up just a few minutes before Elijah left for church. “Hey,” he said. “How’d it go with Monica?”

“She’s gone,” Elijah said in a half-dead voice. “Left a note and her engagement ring.”

Casey’s face fell. “Oh, no! I’m so sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Elijah said automatically, and then started thinking about whether and to what extent it was Casey’s fault. No, he decided after a moment’s thought, it wasn’t. Casey had asked him to promise to help him learn magic or to use magic to help him, which really, almost anyone would under the circumstances. He couldn’t have known that would be a sticking point in Elijah’s first argument with Monica, and he couldn’t have known that the book would teleport right out of the safe he’d put it in just in time to put Elijah in a compromising position. “I’m going to have to call her parents’ house after a while, give her a little time to cool off and all, and put you on the line to tell her you put the book in the safe. Oh, and I hope I can tell her I found her phone, that might put her in a good mood.”

“Planning to go back and use the finding spell?”

“Yes, but I already did, yesterday in the men’s room at the visitor’s center. I just need to cast it again, probably from my car in the parking lot, so I know if it’s still where she dropped it or if someone’s turned it in to the lost and found or if it’s been stolen.”

“Ah. Sounds like a good plan. You going right after church?”

“Yeah.”

“See you later, then.”

---

Elijah timed his arrival at church to avoid having to talk to anyone before the service. He didn’t want to face people’s questions about why Monica wasn’t there, when he’d told them she would be visiting this weekend.

He was distracted during the service, starting to sing the wrong verse of the hymn a couple of times and taking in only a third of the sermon. He kept thinking about what to say to Monica. And, inevitably, to his parents, and extended family, and friends, once he realized that Monica would probably say something about why she’d broken off the engagement to her parents, and they would say something to his parents… But he couldn’t really plan for how to do damage control without knowing what Monica was going to say to her parents. She couldn’t tell the whole truth without evidence and expect to be believed. Could she?

Afterward, he couldn’t avoid talking to people without being rude, and he briefly told a few people that Monica had come to visit, and they’d gone hiking at Beech Mountain the day before, but that they’d had a disagreement about something and she’d gone home early. It seemed they could tell he didn’t want to go into details, and they didn’t press him.

He thought about calling Monica’s parents, or his own, right after the service from his car in the parking lot, while he was in downtown Boone and had reliable cell service. But he decided he’d better give them time to get home from church and eat dinner first. He could call from Beech Mountain; being a resort town, it should have decent cell coverage in most areas as well.

Since he’d eaten a late breakfast, he wasn’t hungry yet. It was a long drive to the park, almost an hour, and around the time he’d normally be getting back to Casey’s house after church, his phone started ringing. He let it go to voicemail the first time, but when it starting ringing again a couple of minutes later, he pulled off into the parking lot of a church and parked the car in time to answer the phone before whoever it was – ah, his parents – hung up. “Hey, Elijah,” his mom said. “Casey said you weren’t home from church yet. I figured you might be eating out or something.”

“No, I’m going back to Beech Mountain to look for Monica’s phone again,” he said. “She lost it when we were hiking yesterday.”

“Speaking of Monica…”

“Yeah, I figured you’d heard something,” he said. “You normally call later in the day. Well, I don’t want to go into a lot of detail yet, I was planning to call Monica later on and talk it out with her if she’s willing, but basically we had an argument yesterday evening and she left this morning before I woke up.”

“Can I ask what the argument was about? Because I heard some… concerning things from Shannon."  Shannon was Monica’s mom. "She said you’d gotten involved with the occult, and I knew that couldn’t be true.”

Elijah felt a sigh coming on and suppressed it. “I showed her one of the unusual books from Casey’s uncle’s collection that I’ve been cataloguing. She decided it was demonic, and asked me to destroy it. I compromised by giving it back to Casey and asking him to put it somewhere secure. He said he’d put it in his safe, and when I checked later, he confirmed that he’d done it. Later, while we were watching a movie, Monica took a restroom break and I noticed a book like it on the coffee table, where we’d shifted some stacks of books around to make room for her laptop. She saw me looking at it when she got back, thought I’d broken my promise and got really mad, and wouldn’t let me explain. She went right to bed and left this morning before I woke up.”

“Oh, honey,” his mom said, “I’m sorry. I’m sure she’ll come around if you give her some time to reflect and then explain what happened. But tell me about this book. I know Monica’s church can be a little trigger happy with the accusations of demonic influence, like with the Harry Potter thing a while back, but it is a real thing, if not as common as they think. Are you sure you’re safe, if the collection you’re cataloguing has occult books in it?”

“Reasonably sure,” Elijah said. “I don’t feel like there’s any harm in that particular book I was talking about, but Monica felt differently, so I agreed to ask Casey to put it in the safe. I was just surprised when I saw that book on the coffee table, because I’d thought Mr. Taggart only owned a handful of books like that, and I thought I knew where all of them were by this point.”

“Well, give Monica some time before you call her.”

“How long should I wait, do you think?”

“How about I pass a message to her saying you’d like to talk with her when she feels up to it?”

“That would be great, thanks.”

They talked for a little longer before saying goodbye; then Elijah got back on the road and drove the rest of the way to Beech Mountain. Once parked at the trailhead, he cast the finding spell again. The phone was still lying near the trail where it had been yesterday. So he turned to grab his water bottle from the cup holder – and saw the spellbook lying in the passenger seat.

“Huh,” he said. “How long have you been sitting there?”

He walked down the trail to the point where he knew the phone was, retrieved it, and thought briefly about doing some more walking before deciding he was hungry enough to just head back to the car and find a local restaurant.

Beech Mountain was a resort town, so there were more restaurants than many towns its size had. It wasn’t hard to find a good place to eat; after looking at the options, he decided on a pizzeria on the north end of town. He was going to leave the book in the car, but the thought occurred to him that it might teleport to his table while he was eating. So far it seemed to have only teleported when no one was looking, but that could be coincidence; he didn’t have many instances to judge from yet. So he brought it with him, along with the Bible he’d brought to church, and read ahead in Luke, resisting the temptation to review chapter four of the spellbook until he’d finished the next chapter of Luke.

After lunch, he texted his mom asking her to let Monica know he’d found her phone and was going to mail it to her on Monday. He was tired enough for a nap when he got back to the house; he hadn’t done all that much, nowhere near as much walking as he’d done on Saturday, but he reflected as he said a distracted hello to Casey and went to lie down that missing Monica and stressing over possibly losing his best friend for good was taking a toll on him.

---

After he woke up, he called Monica’s mom. “Hey,” he said. “I know Monica probably doesn’t want to talk right now, but I hope we can work things out. Could you just let her know I’m willing to talk things over whenever she wants to call me?”

"You’re right, she doesn’t want to talk with you right now. I’ll pass the message along when she’s in a better mood if you’ll promise me one thing.

“What?”

“That you give up this occultism you’ve gotten involved with and separate yourself from everything that could tempt you back into it. Burn the books and leave that awful house.”

“Mrs. Baumann, I can’t burn the book Monica told you about, it belongs to my employer.”

“You need to stop associating with him. Quit that job and find something more productive to do.”

“Mrs. Baumann, I can’t. I need the credits from this internship to graduate on time. And I can’t find another summer job in my field at this short notice.”

“Are your grades and your graduation schedule more important than your soul?”

Elijah was at a loss for a moment how to respond. He didn’t really think his soul was in danger, but didn’t want to say too bluntly to Mrs. Baumann that he thought she and Monica were wildly overreacting.

“No,” he finally said. “But I’ve promised Monica I would –”

“And you violated that promise in less than a day. Why should we believe you now when you aren’t willing to make sacrifices to get away from the temptation?”

Elijah decided that when she started interrupting him, she was done listening.

“All right,” he said. “Could you at least let her know I found her phone? I went back to Emerald Outback and retraced our steps along the trail.” True though incomplete. “I’ll try to get it in the mail tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell her. Goodbye.”

After that, he checked his social media and email. Monica had changed her relationship status from “Engaged” to “Single” and then unfriended him. He had several messages from friends and family asking what was up with him and Monica, and tried to reply to them, but found it exhausting, and only replied to a handful of the private messages before finding his eyes bleary and his limbs exhausted despite his recent nap. He’d planned to work out what he was going to say in a general friends-only post while practicing on his replies to some who had sent emails, but now he didn’t have the energy to write the public post he’d planned. He was thinking about another nap, or at least resting his eyes by listening to music or an audiobook, but just then Casey poked his head into Elijah’s office and said, “Supper’s ready. I understand if you don’t have much appetite, but you should probably try to eat a little.”

“Yeah, I could eat something,” Elijah said. He dragged himself out of the chair and into the dining room, thanking Casey for supper and starting to eat. As Casey had predicted, he didn’t have the appetite to finish his plate.

“It’s okay,” Casey said. “I’ll put some Saran wrap on it and you can eat it when you’re hungry again. Or throw it out later, no feeling guilty about that.”

Elijah protested weakly. “No, I can do that, you don’t have to wait on me.”

“Believe me, I know what a bad breakup is like. You may not absolutely need someone waiting on you, but it’ll probably help.” He picked up Elijah’s plate and took it to the kitchen. Elijah heard him bustling around in the kitchen for a couple of minutes, probably putting away other things as well as Elijah’s plate, and then came back and sat down next to Elijah.

“I know you’d probably rather have one of your close friends with you at a time like this,” he said. “If you want to go home for a couple of days, feel free. Or if you want to spend a lot of time on the phone with your friends, do that. But you probably don’t want to get on the road this late in the day, and if you want me to listen while you talk, or talk about other stuff to distract you, or leave you alone, just let me know.”

“Thanks,” Elijah murmured. After a few moments, he started talking about his day – the awkward conversations with people at church, the more awkward conversation with his mom, the most awkward conversation with Monica’s mom, the messages from friends and extended family asking what was going on. He told him about the arguments between him and Monica on Friday evening and Saturday, and how he’d felt when he found that note and saw Monica’s engagement ring lying there. Casey listened sympathetically, nodding, wincing, and saying a word or two here and there that made Elijah feel heard without interrupting him.

When Elijah finally ran out of words, Casey said nothing for a little while, until it was clear that Elijah wasn’t going to say any more. Then he said, “Do you want a hug?” When Elijah didn’t answer right away, he hastily went on: “I mean, I guess it might be kind of weird, I’m sure there are other people you’d rather be getting hugs from, but –”

“Yeah,” Elijah interrupted with a small smile on his face for the first time since Saturday evening. “I’d like a hug.”

They hugged for a long moment. Then Elijah said, “Thanks for listening. I think I’m going to go to bed.” Then he noticed the spellbook sitting on the dining table not far from his empty tea glass. “Oh, and if you could put that in the safe, or just in a drawer in your bedroom or something…? I don’t know if it’ll listen, but I feel like if I have any chance of getting back with Monica, I’ve got to try.”

“Sure thing.”