He threw it as hard as he could.

Then he rolled everything up inside the rug and shoved it into his closet, behind his shoes, behind his laundry hamper, in the very back where he wouldn’t have to see it.

Now his room felt like the stone of his heart. Cold. Bare. Dark.

Except for the far side of the room.

The far side of the room, where the bright, soft promise of something new stood.

The crib.

The crib was still there.

“She’ll be in our room at first,” his mother had said just two months ago. Her face had been pink and glowing. “But once she outgrows her bassinet—once she’s sleeping through the night—what do you think about her being in your room?”

Wunder had been expecting this question, and he was ready with his answer.

“Yes,” he had told his mother. “Yes, I’d like that.”

And the heart-bird had soared through him.

But she never slept there, in the white crib with the flower-patterned sheet that his mother had washed over and over to take the scratchiness out of it.

She never slept in the bassinet either, the bassinet next to his parents’ bed, ready and waiting for someone small.

She never made it home.

And if that wasn’t proof that miracles didn’t exist, Wunder didn’t know what was.

Chapter 3

The next morning, Wunder and his father walked silently through the woods together. Wunder had his hands in the pockets of his black pants. He was cold in the early-autumn air, especially in the shade of the trees, because he hadn’t worn his jacket. His jacket was sky blue, and sky blue was not a funeral color.

His father was wearing khaki pants and an olive windbreaker, but he couldn’t help it. Wunder’s mother still had not unlocked the door.

Wunder had now been in the woods hundreds of times. He rode his bicycle through them to and from school every day. They weren’t really on the way—in fact, they were very much out of the way. But he liked to stop at the toweringly tall live oak and stare down the dirt path, stare through the leaves and limbs at the DoorWay House.

Just looking at the house had always been enough to give Wunder the heart-bird feeling. And he had always hoped that one day, he would see the spinning again. Or even hear the cawing bird.

What he had never thought much about was what was on the other side of the woods—Branch Hill Cemetery.

Now that was all he could think about. He didn’t even glance at the DoorWay House as they walked past. He knew there would be no spinning today.

The woods ended at the cemetery gates. Inside them, a man in a long white robe was waiting. The man was very, very old with a stooped back and a frizzy halo of dark gray hair and glasses with thick black rims. In one hand he clutched a wooden cane. In the other he held some papers. With a scowl, he thrust them toward Wunder’s father.