At the same time, though, I feel heavy with the weight of knowing everything she had to go through. Everything that Madeline is still going through. I’m not the only one who misses Gram terribly. She was Madeline’s best friend, too.

“Did you leave the flowers on her grave?” Fina asks. “Was it you we saw in the graveyard on Halloween?”

Madeline is blank for a moment, then gives a nod. “From my greenhouse,” she says. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I don’t like talking to people. It’s very—difficult for me.”

“That’s why you wear your headphones when you walk,” I say. “So no one will try to talk to you.”

“Music,” she mumbles, her voice childlike now. “It calms me. I go to church to hear it. And it gives me the courage to go out walking. I don’t like them to go to waste, you know. The berries and the apples. Flowers and the trees—I understand them. Being with them makes me feel less alone. It’s people that make me feel lonely.”

I cross the room and kneel down in front of Madeline. “You’re not alone,” I say.

I take one of her hands. Her skin is thin and soft as silk. I squeeze her hand—gently—because I know it’s what Gram would do if it were me sitting in that chair crying. Because when I was alone and afraid after Gram died, it was Madeline who wrote back to me in the journal.

“Such a kind child,” she says. “Just like your grandmother. Who else would be so kind to an old fraud?”

“But you aren’t a fraud,” I say. “Not really. People don’t just read that book for the story. It’s the way it’s written, too. Besides, if you hadn’t turned Gram’s stories into a book, nobody ever would have gotten to read The World at the End of the Tunnel. Gram loved it, you know. She must have read it to me a dozen times.”

Madeline gives a little sniff, and for the first time since we’ve come, her face seems to relax a bit. “Your gram told me everything about you when she came for her visits,” she says. She reaches her free hand out like she’s going to stroke my cheek, but then she folds it back in her lap. “She told me when she took you to the Golden— Ah, but she called it something else with you. The Spinney, wasn’t it? She told me when she took you there the first time.”

“And the journal?” I ask. “Did you always know about it?”