“Would you give me some time to, um, be alone? If I needed it?” I’m already thinking about Rush, about making sure that I’ll be able to kiss her and know that she’s comfortable and safe and happy.

Emma looks up at me and nods, her eyes eager. They flicker as a stream of fog rolls over us. “Ada,” she whimpers. “Ada, where are you?”

“Emma,” Imogen soothes. “Emma, Emma, Emma.”

We need to leave. I remember that. The rest of it, though, is starting to slip away. I remember thinking this place was strange when I first stepped out of the faerie ring, but what if the place I came from is the strange one? What if sunshine and two-thousand-year-old trees and skin holding you separate from other people are the things that don’t make sense?

The faerie ring is missing, and my dowsing rod is gone, and I have found so much, but I still don’t know how to get back to the Grays safely.

This is the thing I’m worst at.

I don’t tell Imogen and Emma. I find something inside me shaped like confidence, and I spin it into a bridge that’s not really solid but might be solid enough for three girls who aren’t fully there. Our feet pound over it, as the fog pours in all around.

It rolls over me, stealing memories.

Mom. All her hope, all her sadness. The ways I’ve let her down filling the air between us, making it harder to breathe every day. I see her in that little cottage in Tempest Gardens, making phone calls and talking to herself about how I’ll come home soon and shaking until she can’t stand up.

I run faster, but it’s nowhere fast, the kind of speed that eats itself up and then dies. I’m forgetting everything. My life is slipping through my fingers like water, and then my fingers are water, slipping away from me.

“Stay with us, Danny,” Imogen says. She runs beside me. She grips my arm. She keeps me whole.

I’ve known this whole time that the Grays love Imogen, but now I finally feel why — and I get the first inkling that maybe I could love her like that, too. Maybe this was about more than just bringing her back to the Grays. Maybe I get to keep Imogen, too. If we both make it out of here.

I turn in a full circle once, twice, no way to dowse now that I need it more than anything. I have no direction, no tugging inner compass or hidden magnetic lines. I can’t find my way back to the faerie ring, back to my body.

I’ve lost the one thing I always had.

Myself.

The Grays will forget about me soon, and then I might as well be gone.