Sunlight pierces the air, refined into tight golden shafts by the interplay of shade and open space. The ground isn’t only ferns; it’s mushrooms and fallen logs and everything a fairy-tale forest ought to be. She feels like she’s walking into one of her picture books, and she doesn’t think about how she’s getting farther away from home with every step she takes, or how her mother may be worried about her. She only wants to see what’s past the next tree, what’s over the next little rise in the ground. She only wants to find the owl.

She thinks she could be happy never going into the woods again, never doing anything forbidden ever again, if only she could see the owl.

So she walks, and she walks, and home dwindles behind her, forgotten, forsaken, until something bigger than she is rustles in the brush to her left, and she jumps, startled, and realizes she has no idea where she is.

Anastasia is three and a half years old, which feels very grown-up and mature when she’s explaining to her grandfather how she absolutely deserves extra ice cream, and which suddenly feels very small and very young and very alone.

“Mama?” she says.

The woods answer with the rustle of branches and the call of small, distant birds.

“Mama!”

Not once in Anastasia’s life before now has a sincere cry for help gone unanswered. But this time is different. This time, she has wandered past the edges of what is allowed. She has gone too far to be heard.

Crying now, Anastasia starts to run. She isn’t the fastest thing in the world anymore. She’s the lostest, and all she wants is to be found. She’s also running the wrong way. She runs and runs until her foot finds a shallow root, and then she’s tripping, she’s falling, she’s rolling down a hill, and there’s mud in her hair and moss in her mouth and she wants … she wants …

“I wanna go home!” she wails, sitting up and drumming her heels against the ground.

She smells something.

It smells like … like popcorn and cookies and grass that’s just been cut and watermelon and sugar candy. It smells like all the good things in the whole world, all jumbled up together. She sniffles, tears stopping, and thinks about candy houses in the middle of the wood, the kind with gingerbread walls and sweet frosting eaves. She doesn’t think about witches, or the kind of things that might use a candy house as a lure. She’s still too young to take the dark messages from the fairy tales she listens to at bedtime, and all she’s thinking of is candy.