“Maybe you’re close to her the same way she was close to him,” Wunder suggested.

“Hold on, Wundie. Let me think about that for a minute,” Faye said. Then she sighed. “No, I don’t think we are. She thinks I’m a weirdo. What about you and your parents? Are you close?”

“We were,” Wunder said. He thought about how his father had been trying to be around more but still worked late most nights. He thought about how his mother had come out of her room a few times to watch television or eat with him, but how she didn’t talk much or smile and how she always went back to her room, how she always shut the door again.

“You still are,” Faye assured him. “I’m sure you still are.” He hoped she wouldn’t say that Milagros’s death would connect them. And she didn’t. Not exactly. What she said was “Maybe we haven’t gotten to the close part yet. Maybe it takes a while.”

“Maybe,” Wunder said doubtfully. “But the people we’ve delivered letters to, so many of them seem sad and lonely. And we never see them here, in the cemetery. Everyone stays away. It doesn’t seem like losing someone brings people together. It seems like it pushes them apart.”

When Faye didn’t answer right away, Wunder looked over to find that her hood was up. She was completely hidden, a wind-blown, black cocoon.

“My mom never talks about my grandfather,” she said, barely audible. “She didn’t even want to come to the graveyard on his birthday. How can his death bring us closer if she’s afraid to think about him?” The next thing she said was so soft, so near-silent that Wunder had to put his head down next to hers to hear it. “I think about him a lot.”

Wunder didn’t sit back up. He stretched out on the ground, his hands fiddling with the blades of dry grass, his eyes on the black velvet of the hood. “I think about Milagros too,” he said. “Even though at first, I didn’t want to come to the cemetery either. And now I am, but my dad hasn’t been back and my mom has never come. And they don’t talk about her. They don’t talk about anything.”

There was no answer from the cocoon.

Wunder worried suddenly that he had offended her. He thought of what Tomás had said, that he’d known Milagros for only eight days. Faye had known her grandfather for her whole life. What if she thought he couldn’t possibly understand how she felt?

“I know—I know it’s different,” he said, fumbling for words, “losing a baby sister and losing a grandfather. But I think some of what we feel is the same.”

Faye pulled her hood off and got to her knees. Her face was flushed and her eyes were bright and wet. “Of course it is, Wundie,” she said. “That’s why we’re doing this together. Eight days or eight hundred years doesn’t matter.” She reached into her cloak and pulled out a bobby pin.