In the early evening on Monday, everyone collects at the Crow’s Nest. The parking lot is full—as full as it would be for a Last Things show, even though the coffeehouse is closed for the search, its doors shut and locked. Everyone is forming pairs or groups, getting ready to walk into the woods, holding hands, turning on their phones for extra light. Jezz and Patrick are there, along with Ellie and Lee and Mac. I see Ike, with a black flashlight the size of a baseball bat, and Janos, with a camping lantern. He nods at me.

I don’t have a phone. I don’t have a flashlight. I don’t have anything that would give the woods something to push against. They’ll already be watching me.

There are police in the parking lot, two men in uniform, standing next to their squad cars. They didn’t organize this. The official theory is still that Frankie ran away. She’s an adult, technically. She has money. Her own car. But they’re here anyway. In case.

Everyone lines up around the lot, along the edges of the road. This is the last place Frankie was seen. The last place they could trace her phone.

At someone’s signal, everyone walks into the woods. More than two hundred people. They make a wavy ribbon, all colors and textures, before they weave into the trees, moving deeper and deeper, until at last the woods swallow them up.

I wait until everyone else is gone and the police have turned away to watch the searchers disappear. Then I walk in the direction no one else is walking. Away from town. Away from the direction Frankie turned her car. I walk north.

Pines. Layers of them. Sunset is still an hour or more away, but the sky is already tinged rose orange. The light catches in the pines. They shake and flicker. It’s like walking through a forest of burning candles. The farther I go, the hotter they burn.

I climb over a creek bed narrower than a sidewalk. The underbrush is thick. Poison sumac, poison oak. I hold the cuffs of my sleeves tight. The woods will stop you any way they can.

Ahead of me is the fallen trunk of an oak tree. I remember it from Saturday night—its texture, its scent. It’s covered in moss and seashells of fungus, its surface spongy and wet. It crumbles where my heels sink in.

Just past the fallen tree, in the distance, is a little clearer spot in the trees. And in the clear spot, I see it. A shriveled apple tree.

“Apples,” Aunt Mae had muttered, still deep asleep, when I brought her coffee to the living room that morning. “And he’s so hungry . . .”

I didn’t wake her. But I went back to the kitchen and took one of the pink-gold apples from the crisper drawer, still left from the sack she’d bought last week. I washed it and left it beside her coffee cup.