I blush so hard that I’m competing with the sunset. Rush doesn’t seem to notice. She stares down at her hands, one of them pressing the strings, the other one working the bow. A chord slides out, bursting with unexpected harmonies. She grates the bow across the strings on purpose, then smooths the sound over. It brightens the air, wakes up the birds. They take to the sky. The wind picks up, shaking the flowers at the edges of the cemetery. Rush’s playing is a call to everything around us — living and dead. “Imogen wandered out of the woods one day.”

The birds flock above us. Ravens and crows and smaller ones, starlings maybe. A dark swirl of birds.

I close my eyes and listen as Rush plays herself into the past.

Emma and Imogen: Two Months Ago

Rush and Imogen were together. Pasted to each other’s sides, always kissing. Those weeks of wandering were the worst Emma had ever known, a doubled pain pressing down on her.

She felt like crying, but she couldn’t cry. Instead, the world filled with a stinging-cold rain. When she was stupid enough to follow Imogen through the woods one day, she found Imogen and Rush pressed against a tree, untouchable. Every drop of rain that flowed around their skin was a reminder.

They had what Emma never would.

She left that clearing in a hurry, not wanting to see the rest. The inevitable, perfect moments of love. Emma waited for time to sweep this whole thing away like a rough broom. In a few years, Imogen would leave her behind. Someday she would die. There was no real comfort for this, only an inching away from pain.

The next time Emma visited the mother tree, Imogen was waiting. She sat on the mossy center of the fallen trunk, wearing a loose creamy-white dress with an eyelet pattern.

“I missed you,” Imogen said the moment Emma came into the grove.

“That doesn’t change anything,” Emma said, instead of what she meant. She meant, I missed you, too.

“I can’t keep doing this,” Imogen said, and Emma waited for the moment when Imogen announced that she would leave forever, that she would never visit the woods again. Imogen looked down at the ground, then up at the blank space where Emma should be. “I need to see you. Really see you. I think I found a way.”

Danny: Now

The last note from Rush’s cello haunts the air, and then we’re sitting in the kind of tense, breakable silence that makes me realize how natural and calm the silence of cemeteries usually feels.

“When did you stop playing?” I ask, pointing at the cello with my sneaker. “I mean, officially?”

“When I met Hawthorn, she told me about chanting. I loved the idea. I’m not even a good singer, really.”