The years passed with the sticky crawl of molasses. Emma did not grow older, and she never tried to find her way home. There hadn’t been anything there for her, except Ada. Without Ada, she was lonely. When living girls wandered past Emma, she took to saying hello. Most of the girls looked up for a moment and then went on their way.

One day, Emma saw a red-haired girl walking with her shoes off. After decades of mostly silence, Emma’s own voice sounded odd in her ears, like the rustle of dry leaves. “Hello? Hello!”

This girl’s head snapped up. This girl didn’t stop searching even after she’d looked over every inch of the grove. She called, “Who is that?”

Emma started talking, and her words flooded the woods. This girl, this Imogen, heard her, followed her, nipped at her heels. Asked her a hundred questions and then heaped on a hundred more.

Imogen’s life and Emma’s death wove together. Emma was older than Imogen at first, and she thought of her as a sweet playmate, a lively spark in a cold world. But as Imogen grew, her beauty and wildness wove together, too. Emma noticed. Imogen started asking Emma new questions. “What did you look like, when you were alive?”

“I had dark hair, I think. I never could get it to stay put.”

Imogen laughed. “I can picture that. What else?”

“I . . . don’t remember.”

“You’re afraid to remember.” Imogen smiled, privately. “I’ll bet you were soft and had the smoothest skin. I’ll bet you were lovely.”

Imogen visited Emma in the woods often, sitting by her side with little more than a whispered greeting when someone else was near — most often Imogen’s friends, the Grays. Imogen asked, more than once, if she could tell them about her. Emma didn’t want that. She was afraid the Grays wouldn’t believe in her, and it would break her heart all over again.

Danny: Now

What do you want?” Rush says, not to me, but to the girl in the picture, running her hand over the article, using one fingertip to blot out Emma’s face for a moment before she pulls it away.

I flatten my palm on the page with the news clipping about Emma’s disappearance and pull it away from the binding of the book, wincing as the tear goes jagged. I make sure that the book is tucked back where it came from — not that I can imagine anyone noticing a single page being gone.

Rush and I leave the visitors’ center without bothering the employee in the back room. Outside, the sky has committed to darkness.