The birds were out whirring, and the garden glowed in the golden light. I couldn’t believe this was my life now, that the Farm was my home. As much as I missed Mom, and as scared as I was of Horace, I still felt lucky somehow that I could live in a place like this.

A hummingbird hovered right near my nose, its red head bobbing like a cork in invisible water. In fact, he seemed to be staring right at me, same as the hummingbird had in my vision earlier.

“Hey, buddy,” I said. “You got something to show me?”

The hummingbird tilted his head, and in the sunset glare, the light seemed to pass through him, like he was made of dust.

That’s when I realized this hummingbird wasn’t real—or at least it wasn’t real in the physical sense. It was a vision. I knew if I reached my hand out I would swipe through it, clean as empty air.

The hummingbird zipped away from me, taking off in a strange darting trajectory. It was hard to keep up, the way it seemed to change course so quick, to ricochet off nothing at all. I was running full speed, scrambling past tree stumps and molehills down a rough path past the Hummingbird Grove, past the garden, to a part of the Farm I’d never been to before. The trees were taller here, the bark bent and warped, and they stood like sentinels—guardians who had seen windstorms and wars and tornadoes and who had stood strong through all of it. They were wise, these trees, and they had their years scarred into their bark. The hummingbird stopped in front of one tree, bigger than the rest, with a hole right in the middle of the trunk like someone had reached in and removed the tree’s heart.

The hummingbird tilted his beak at me and darted off, vanishing into a patch of sunlight.

The tree didn’t look exactly like it had in my vision, but it was close enough, and besides, it was here where I’d been led. I felt a chill spiderwebbing up my spine. It felt as if the hole in the tree was staring at me, like any moment eyes would appear in the darkness, same as they had in my vision.

But nothing happened. I stood there and waited. Somewhere far off I heard the sound of wind chimes, the skittering of creatures in the leaves. Was there something I was missing, something I had forgotten?

In the vision, the pale hand had reached out to me. But then, real life wasn’t always exactly like my visions. Things changed sometimes, and the details weren’t necessarily quite the same. What if in reality it was supposed to be reversed? Maybe I was supposed to reach into the tree?

I didn’t want to. I mean, there could have been spiders or bats or something in there. It’s just generally not good policy to stick your hand into a dark place, especially in the woods.