In the woods, Wunder finally slowed down. He knew no one would be there. No one ever was. The leaves hadn’t begun to change yet, and the light that filtered through them patchworked a green-tinted pattern on the path. A soft breeze made the Spanish moss sway and the oak leaves wave.

The woods, he thought, might be a good place to leave the book. He searched for the perfect spot as he walked. But he still couldn’t find one.

Coming from this direction, he reached the cemetery gates before the DoorWay House. He held on to the iron bars and peered in. Gravestones dotted the fields like crooked teeth in a massive, yawning jaw, like dominoes set up and ready to fall. So many graves. Mostly, he thought, the graves of older people, people who had lived long lives, but maybe there were some like his sister’s.

Graves of the unknown or the barely known, graves of the lost.

He pulled on the gate and found that it wasn’t locked. He wasn’t sure if there were rules about visiting cemeteries. It felt wrong to go in, but he went in anyway.

He stopped at the first grave he came to. There was a simple headstone there. The words glinted gold, a metallic wink, a signal, a beacon shining out from the black background.

Vita mutatur, non tollitur, read the words at the top of the stone. Beneath that was a name—Dalia Ramos—and dates.

Wunder didn’t know what the words meant, but he could read the dates. Dalia was eighty-two when she died.

Eighty-two seemed like a good number of years to live.

He thought of his sister’s gravestone. It hadn’t been made yet, but he knew what it would look like. His father had shown him. The dates were carved in polished white marble, and if anyone bothered to calculate how long she had lived, they would come up with eight. Eight days.

Eighty-two years. Eight days.

The wind blew, and the shadow of a cloud fell across the golden words. Wunder could barely read them anymore.

He straightened up and walked farther into the cemetery, pausing here and there to look at grave markers, to read dates. Micah Shunem, who had been thirty years old when he died and a beloved son and brother. Avery Lazar, whose headstone didn’t have any dates, just a statue of a white bird, wings spread in flight. A gray stone monument with the name Kobayashi across the top and black script and the outlines of little flowers beneath.

The treeless hill rose up ahead of him, grass green and empty. Wunder considered going to the base of the hill, to his sister’s grave. He wouldn’t say a prayer for her, but maybe he could sit next to her grave here the way he had sat next to her in the hospital.

But the longer he stayed in the cemetery, the less he wanted to be there.

When Wunder used to write in The Miraculous, he would sometimes feel like he was doing a miracle of his own. He would feel like there was something special about bringing all those stories from all those people together. Like he was connecting the dots of each soul he wrote about—connecting them to himself and to one another and to everything that gave him the heart-bird feeling.