Caroline takes Anastasia in her arms, and everything is perfect. Everything is just the way it’s supposed to be, forever.

4.

The Millers live in a small town in Washington State, surrounded by trees on all sides, with the mountains misty in the distance, playing hide-and-seek with the shadows cast by clouds. It rains less often than people from out of state assume, more often than Caroline, cooped up in a three-bedroom house with an excitable toddler, would prefer.

Whenever the sun is shining—and sometimes when it’s not—Anastasia is outside, tearing around the yard, kicking her little wheeled scooter down the driveway, chasing the squirrels that cluster and chitter in the nearby trees. Their street doesn’t get much traffic, and they know all their neighbors; it’s as safe here as it could be anywhere. That’s enough to make up for the boredom, Caroline thinks. Her daughter is safe.

Anastasia has only three rules for playing outside. Don’t go into the street; don’t go down the sidewalk unless her mommy or one of her grandparents is in the yard to watch her; and don’t go into the trees. The woods are very big and she is very small, and she would be lost very quickly if she strayed too far.

She doesn’t want to go into the street. She saw one of the squirrels after it had gone into the street, and it was flat like a pancake, or like one of the paper dolls her gramma cuts out for her. Only it wasn’t a paper doll, and it wasn’t a pancake, it was D-E-A-D, dead, and it was never going to chitter at her from the trees ever again. She doesn’t want to be flat and quiet forever, so she doesn’t want to go into the street.

She doesn’t want to go down the sidewalk when there’s no one to see her. She has a feeling, vague and unfounded but solid enough to haunt her dreams, that sometimes people go down the sidewalk and they don’t come back. All the other kids she knows have mommies and daddies. They aren’t always in the same combination—Shawna has two mommies, and Mark has two daddies—and they aren’t always around—Alison’s mommy drives a big truck, and she’s gone for weeks sometimes—but they exist. No one ever talks about her daddy, or says where he is, but sometimes her mommy looks at the sidewalk with a great big sadness in her eyes, like everything is wrong. Anastasia’s daddy must have gone out when no one could see, and he couldn’t find his way back to home. She doesn’t want to get lost forever, so she doesn’t want to go down the sidewalk.

But the trees …