It was part of their magic, she said, that they appeared different to different people.

Today, though, no one appears at all. It’s just Boomer and me, alone in the glade. I didn’t really expect anyone to answer my call. I’m starting to think that the charmed folk were only ever real because Gram said they were.

Now that she’s gone, they’ve gone, too.

I slide from the rock to the ground and walk softly over to the sycamore hollow to pull out the book inside. The very same book I found that first day in the Spinney.

It’s stayed dry enough out here over the years, because the hollow is deep. But inside its leather cover, its pages are soft and worn. I open it to the first page, on which are written a few spidery words:

The Spinney Chronicles

And underneath, in my terrible second-grade handwriting:

BY: EMMA TALBOT AND GRAM

I flip through each page, watching my handwriting get smaller and neater as the years go by. Gram’s handwriting, meanwhile, never changes.

This book is a record of all the afternoons the two of us spent in the glade together with the charmed folk. The first stories are devoted to the fairy clans. Then come the ones about the elves, and then the forest troll, and after that the gnomes.

Whenever we finished a story, Gram would tell me to read it to her in the glade. “Stories are like spells,” she said. “They never work properly unless you tell them aloud.”

Whenever I told one of the stories we’d written, all the charmed folk would gather around to listen as I read from my perch on Throne Rock. They loved to hear stories about themselves, Gram said. And after I was done, I would run around the wood with them, all of us acting out the story I had just read while Gram watched and laughed. The charmed folk love make-believe, too.

That’s how I remember it, anyway.

Three-quarters of the way through the book, the pages go blank.

The empty sheets sting my eyes and claw at my throat.

Gram and I should have filled this whole book together. The idea that the pages will stay blank forever now is unbearable.

There is still a pencil nestled in the journal, and I find myself picking it up. It feels good in the crook of my thumb. Like it belongs there.

I’m not ready to go back home, but I don’t want to be here in the Spinney alone, either. I want to be somewhere else entirely. I want to climb into the journal and the world that Gram and I created and never, ever leave.

So I begin to write.