Evanelle looked up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry, Mary. But how can it hurt now? Look at them. They’re doing all right,” she said, like she was used to speaking to ghosts who didn’t talk back. She pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat with a sigh. “After your grandmother got the call about Lorelei dying in that huge car pileup, she figured it out. She told me after she had taken to her bed, about two months before she passed away. As close as we can figure, Lorelei ate an apple when she was about ten. The day she ate that apple she probably saw the way she was going to die, and every wild thing she did afterward was to try to make it not come true, to make something happen that was even bigger than that. We figured that you two brought her back here, that for a while she accepted her fate because you needed taking care of. Mary said that the night Lorelei disappeared again she found her in the garden, for the first time since she was a child. She might have eaten another apple that night. Things seemed to be going well here; maybe Lorelei thought that her fate had changed. But it hadn’t. She left you girls here to be safe. She was supposed to die alone in that huge wreck. The tree always liked your mother. I think it knew its apples would show her something bad. It never tossed apples at her like it does the rest of the family. It’s always trying to get us to know something. But Lorelei had to drag a ladder into the garden to pick one. Mary remembered finding the ladder outside the garage after Lorelei left. Are you girls all right?”

“We’re fine,” Claire said, but Sydney was still a little stunned. Her mother didn’t pick her fate. She didn’t pick the way she lived. But Sydney, in imitating her, had chosen to do those things.

“I’ll just head outside, then,” Evanelle said.

“Watch out. The tree is cranky today. It keeps trying to move the table. Even Bay can’t reason with it,” Claire said. “We’re hoping it doesn’t freak Tyler and Henry out.”

“If those boys are going to be in your lives, you better tell them everything. The first thing I said to my husband when I was six years old was, ‘I have to give people things. It’s who I am.’ Intrigued him so much he came to my window that night.” Evanelle took her tote bag and walked outside.

“Do you think she’s right?” Sydney said. “About Mom, I mean.”

“It makes sense. Remember, after we got the phone call that Mom had died, Grandma trying to set fire to the tree?”