I feel arms grabbing my legs. Little arms squeezing tight.

I look down and see Alice crying with relief. Not Annie. Alice.

I look down and see Daisy unconscious at my feet. The rock still in my hands.

The man runs toward us now.

We hear the sirens stop and voices call from the driveway.

“Here!” the man yells back. “We’re down here!”

Alice cries harder. I let the rock fall and I lean down to pick her up in my arms. She wraps her entire being around my body and I hold her tight.

“It’s all right,” I say.

Nicole comes now, out from the woods. She sees me and I see her. And I am floating in an ocean of love.

Just devastating, blissful love.

“It’s all right,” I say again.

And I think to myself, that maybe it is.

Chapter Fifty-six

Seven months later

It was not easy to make the turn down Hastings Pass.

Nic had insisted on driving. She knew the way, she said. But that wasn’t the reason. That turn, this road, everything about this town had become a monster under her bed. The flashes came in nightmares. They came in daydreams as she ran, stopping her in her tracks. Stealing her breath. A flash of the inn, or the fence, or the woods.

She needed to face it. To look under the bed and see that there was nothing there. That it was just a town, and the people who had terrorized them were now dead or in prison.

Her mother held on to her shoulder as they drove past the Gas n’ Go.

“Are you okay?” she asked, though her eyes were on the gas station—the place where all of this started.

Jared Reyes had followed Daisy Hollander to Hastings after that summer in Woodstock. He’d been working in the kitchen—one of a string of odd jobs he’d taken after leaving the force in Worcester.

Then he’d found work in Hastings providing security for the company that owned the property behind the inn—the investors who had wanted to build a mental facility but were shut down by town protests. They owned the Gas n’ Go as well. Reyes monitored the security cameras at the station and looked after the property and buildings that had once been part of Ross Pharma. He used these positions to find his marks and run his cons, even after Watkins took him under his wing.

Nic smiled, nodded. “I’m okay,” she said to her mother. Though she had a knot in her stomach as they drove over the wave of hills, past the neglected cornfields on both sides. But it was different this time. The air was warm. The sun was shining. Green leaves covered the trees as they entered the town.

Mrs. Urbansky met them at the door of the station. She pulled Nic into her arms, then did the same with her mother.