Content Warning: This section of the guide mentions suicide, self-harm, and disordered eating. It also includes racist and xenophobic content, including offensive terms for Black people and undocumented citizens, which is replicated in this guide only in direct quotation of the source material.

The Prologue reveals the ending of White Is for Witching: Miranda Silver has vanished. Ore, Miranda’s girlfriend at Cambridge University, claims that Miranda lies within the house in Dover on 29 Barton Street, locked somewhere in its walls. She suggests that Miranda sees and hears nothing, and that winter apples, red-and-white apples from the house, block her mouth. She explains that Miranda chose her prison as a defense against the soucouyant, a vampiric-like spirit in Caribbean folklore that preys on the living at night.

The narration then shifts to Eliot, Miranda’s twin brother, who recounts their last argument and Miranda’s history living with mental illness. Describing his sister as the thinnest she’d been, Eliot catalogs the size of her head and hands, and notes she smelled oddly. He refused to engage with Miranda after she claimed she couldn’t trust him, and he heard her door slam. He never saw her again and assumes she won’t return.