I kind of expect her to ask me what I’m talking about, but she doesn’t. Instead, she looks me straight in the eye and says, “I see you, Emma. You can’t disappear as long as I see you, right? But you gotta stop pushing me away.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just feel . . . separate from everybody. Like no one else can understand what’s happening to me.”

A gust of wind blows through the trees, making Fina pull her jacket tighter. “I’m trying to understand,” Fina says. “But it’s kind of hard when you aren’t talking to me.”

She’s right. I know she is. I need to talk to her. I owe her that much, after she came out here looking for me even though I know I hurt her feelings. But it still takes me a few seconds to summon up the words, to figure out where to start.

“Well,” I say finally, “I keep asking myself why this happened to me. And right after Gram died. It just feels like, one minute, everything was fine, and the next minute, nothing was the way it was supposed to be anymore. Like I was cursed.”

“I don’t know about cursed,” Fina says, “but my mom says bad things always come in threes.”

“I only said two.”

“You forgot about Edie.”

I fish out a smile. It’s small, but it’s real.

“Keep going,” she says.

“When I first got diagnosed,” I say, taking a deep breath, “I was really worried that it would get worse and people would stare at me all the time. And then it did get worse, and Edie sent that text, and my fear came true. But now it’s like people don’t even see me anymore. Like I don’t exist. And that feels even worse.”

Fina reaches over and plucks a yellow leaf from my hair. “Yeah. I get that. But don’t you ever think that maybe you’re kind of . . . making yourself invisible?” she asks, twirling its stem between her fingers. “I mean, I know everything has been super hard since Edie’s text. But people probably aren’t going to look at you if you don’t talk to anyone or look at anyone or raise your hand in class, you know? It doesn’t help. Neither does telling me to sit somewhere else at lunch.”

I have a sudden vision of the Apple Lady, walking around the village like a ghost, never talking or looking anyone in the eye. I think about how people ignore her or cross the street when they see her coming. And for the first time, it occurs to me to wonder what made her that way. Maybe something happened to her, too. But maybe she didn’t have a Fina to come looking for her.