Carefully cupping it in her hands, Wendy walked over to her bed and collapsed onto her back. She sank into the comforter, which gently enveloped her like a cloud. Wendy reached back and turned on the strand of fairy lights that framed the window above the head of her bed, casting a warm glow over her and her shiny acorn.

What a disaster today had been.

No one liked her birthday. Her parents didn’t like it because it reminded them that their two sons were missing. Wendy didn’t like it for the same reason. The only good thing about this birthday was that now she was eighteen, it was summer, and in a few months she would be off to college. Away from the ghosts that followed her.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Benjamin Lane and Ashley Ford. Wendy wondered if the police would start sending search parties into the woods like they did when she and her brothers had gone missing … Could the disappearances happening now be related to what had happened to her and her brothers?

She hoped not. She dreaded it, in fact. Wendy had spent the last five years trying to escape that looming shadow just to be swallowed up by it again.

And then there was Peter.

Was it just an odd coincidence that a boy had turned up next to the woods, unconscious in the middle of the road? Was this somehow all related? Had he been kidnapped? Had he escaped someone just before she found him?

Tilting her head back, she gazed at the small lights. When she was little, her mother had always told her that fairy lights watched over children as they slept and kept them safe. It seemed like a ridiculous idea now as she rolled onto her side, still fiddling with the acorn.

Yet she still slept with the string of lights on every night. She wouldn’t sleep with the lights off—or rather she couldn’t. Jordan had tried inviting her to a sleepover once, a few months after she was released from the hospital, but when it was time to turn off the lights, Wendy had such a bad panic attack, it scarred both of them enough that they never tried again.

Wendy nuzzled her cheek into her pillows and curled her legs up under her night shirt. Maybe she would go back to the hospital and try to talk to Peter again. Maybe after a good night’s rest, her head would be clearer and she’d be able to see that he was just a random, run-of-the-mill boy. She held the acorn between her thumb and forefinger.

Where did you come from? she wondered. Wendy placed it on her bedside table and stared at it for a moment longer before finally drifting off to sleep.