“Stranger things have happened.” Dad winks at me.

“Hey, Mom?” I ask.

“Uh-oh,” Mom says. “I know that voice. That’s the voice of a girl whose about to ask for something. Something big.”

“Not really,” I say. “It’s just, I was thinking—do we have room for one more at dinner?”

Mom turns the faucet off, flicking the water from her hands before she turns to look at me. “Are you thinking about Madeline Mitchell?”

I nod.

She glances at Dad. “We’ll have plenty of food,” he says. “It sounds like the Ramirezes are bringing enough to feed the whole village.”

“Well, it’s fine by me,” says Mom. “The more the merrier.”

For a while, I sit next to Lily on the couch. She’s watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade while I thumb through a new book. Well, a new old book. The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

It’s hard for me to really understand most of the poems inside, but Gram has made little notes in the margins. Questions and comments and things. She obviously read this book many, many times. I even found a poem where she must have borrowed the name “Goldengrove” from. It’s about a girl looking at an autumn forest.

Which reminds me. There’s something I have to do. A story I have to finish.

So I set the poems aside, bundle up, and take Boomer out to our own autumn forest. We trace our usual path along High Street, past the church, and down to the meadows. Boomer breaks into a sprint when we cross under the barbed wire.

The woods are bright with sunlight but quiet as midnight. I run my hands along the trunks of the trees as I walk, listening to the golden crunch of the leaves under my feet.

The cold is sharp against my cheeks, but I don’t mind it. It’s the kind of cold that reminds you that you’re alive, that you have a whole day stretching out ahead of you and you just never know what it will hold.

When I get to the grove, I pull the journal out from the sycamore hollow. As I do, I notice something I never have before. The gray bark on the sycamore tree. Bits of it have begun to peel away, exposing pale patches of new bark underneath. I smile, running my hand over the sycamore’s trunk before turning away.

Ivy’s story isn’t finished yet. It needs one more chapter. I sit down on Throne Rock and write furiously, until my hand starts to cramp. Until I’ve said everything I need to say.

I’m just getting up to return the journal to the sycamore hollow, where Madeline can read it, when I stop.

Gram always made me read our stories out loud when we finished them.