We make our way up the path as fast as we can. Just as we crest the ridge, I see her walking along the cliff’s edge, her long dark hair blowing in the breeze. She’s staring in the opposite direction, searching for something.

“Rosie!” she’s calling. “Rosie!” Out of breath, as if her life depended on finding me. She’s so disheveled and upset, it looks as if she’s run all the way here.

“I’m here!” I call to my mom, and she whips around to see me.

She clutches her hands to her chest. Her eyes fill with tears.

“Rosie?” she yells, her shoulders sinking in relief—the way you feel when you find something you’ve lost that you care about more than anything else in the world. She smiles so big, the way you might smile if someone gave you an island in Hawaii, I guess.

“Where have you been?” she calls to me.

And then she opens her arms, and I rush into them.

Part 3

CHAPTER 31

Here’s a thing or two I’ve learned about memories.

They are like seeds; love can grow from them. They look different depending on the day when they are remembered. They are slippery, malleable things, apt to be altered. They can be clutched too tightly. Their absence can cause fractures that run deep between people, towns, whole countries. They are meant, sometimes, to be let go. And yet, the night the Memory Thief was destroyed and the memory moths set free, the world became a little better for it.

Everywhere, strange, subtle things have happened—stories I see on the news: Grandparents who’ve forgotten names and faces suddenly smiling at their grandchildren. Amnesiacs showing up in their families’ backyards. Towns publicly reflecting on histories long forgotten. Even if people don’t see the invisible moths in the sky, dropping dust on them like snow, maybe they feel it.

Even the reporters look happy as they relate these stories.

Like memory, time is both a measurable thing and an immeasurable one. It’s true that at the end of our curling and lonely road in Maine, the months pass. It’s also true that, under the surface of the sea, time stays in one place, or rather a million places at once. And I think about it all the time. I think about them. The witches.

Are they coming for me? Are they scared of me? Do they know who or where I am? Do they know what I did? The days pass, and there are no answers, and I settle into a fragile kind of safety. The longer it lasts, the less likely it seems they will ever arrive. Maybe the idea that a witch hunting weapon has succeeded again, after all these years, is enough to keep them away forever. Homer did call them cowardly creatures. I count on it now.