“Let them get in the car, hon,” Dad says over my shoulder. I release him, and he opens the back seat door and helps Fina in, Boomer jumping in after her.

He and Mom ask Fina about a dozen times if she thinks her ankle could be broken, and by the time she’s finally convinced them that it doesn’t hurt that much, we’re home. So it’s not until we’re back sitting around the table in the kitchen of Morning Glory Cottage—me, Fina, Mom, Dad, and Lily—that I get to explain where we’ve been.

I tell them everything.

Well, almost everything. I don’t tell them about sneaking out of the house on Halloween or about our stakeout. I do tell them about the journal, though, and how someone was writing to me and how we figured out that it was Madeline Mitchell.

I tell them what we heard from Old Joe, Gloria, and Ruth, and Dad’s face goes pale. Mom brings her fingers to her lips.

“Sick?” Dad asks. “What was she sick with?”

Fina and I take turns explaining everything Madeline told us. About The World at the End of the Tunnel and Gram’s vitiligo.

Then a few seconds tick by in silence.

Dad rubs his face with his palms, shaking his head. “I can’t believe she never told us.”

“Which part?” Mom asks.

“Any of it,” Lily says. “All of it. How could Gram’s parents be so cruel?” She bites her lip. Her eyes shine.

Mom, who is sitting between me and Lily, puts an arm around each of us, but she looks at me. “I know. The world was a different place back then, but I can’t imagine doing something like that to a child, then or ever. I really can’t.”

“Her long dresses and that parasol,” says Lily. “I thought she just liked dressing weird.”

“She was always so careful about her skin,” Dad muses. “Always. She used to say she burned very easily. I just thought she was being overly cautious.”

“But she had no pigment in her skin,” finishes Mom. “So she had to protect it from the sun. Or she could have done a lot of damage.”

“Now I know why she didn’t like talking about her childhood,” Dad says quietly. “But it’s easy to see where her imagination came from, isn’t it? It’s how she got through it.”

“I found her sketchbook upstairs,” I tell them. “It’s full of drawings of fairies and things that she did, probably when she was stuck inside. All her ideas.”

“Let me get this straight,” Lily says, running a hand through her hair. “You’re saying that our grandmother was a famous author? Or she would have been, except this Madeline woman plagiarized her story?”