There's bits of this that Rosie already can't quite understand--the candles, the picture on the floor, the teacup on the dresser with the dregs of something odd-smelling inside--but when Sabrina beckons her over, she goes without question. What Sabrina says pulls at her heart a little; it sounds desperate, like some kind of bargaining or denial, and who could blame her? To believe something like that, that the boy she'd loved so deeply had been replaced somehow though some Darrow trickery, made the whole thing far easier to bear.

Rosie nearly opens her mouth to murmur some kind of reassurance, a commiseration from one heartbroken girl to another, but she looks at Sabrina just before she does, and the expression on her face stills the words before she can voice them. This isn't denial. This is conviction.

"You know that for sure? Because of..." Rosie looks back at the candles, the picture, the book in her friend's lap. "And you know this...it worked the way it ought to?"