“You’re welcome, Wunder,” she said. “Anytime.”

She waited until he was on his bike before she shut the door. She shut it very gently. He didn’t even hear it click closed.

And Wunder knew as he pedaled home that the answers he was looking for weren’t going to come from the families of the miraculous dead. He knew that he had spent enough time trying not to believe and he had spent enough time trying to find answers on his own. The only thing that would be enough was to talk to the witch—to ask her why she was there and what she wanted from him and who she was. To ask if she was his sister.

But still, still, still he didn’t know if he could.

Because if none of it was enough, then she was his last hope. She was his very last hope.

Chapter 29

Halloween was on a Wednesday that year, and Golden Fig Middle School had a costume party on the Friday before. Wunder wasn’t planning on going, but Faye had insisted.

“Listen, Wundie. We have to go,” she’d said. “I have the best costume, but you’re the only one who will get it. So if you’re not there, no one will get it. Which I’m used to, but it would be nice to have someone get it. For once in my life.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll go. I’ll get it,” Wunder had said. “But I’m not wearing a costume this year.”

“Mine will be supernaturally spectacular enough for both of us,” Faye had assured him.

And when she walked into the school gym that Friday night, Wunder had to admit, her costume was pretty supernaturally spectacular. And he had to agree: No one else would get it.

Faye wore a white dress. Around her arms, torso, and waist, she had wrapped white cloth napkins, a white bandanna, and even white toilet paper. She had a wig of long black hair, and her face was covered in painted-on lines—lines from her nose to her mouth, lines around her eyes, lines across her forehead. Wrinkle lines. She was carrying a stack of envelopes in her hand.

Wunder laughed. “Everyone probably thinks you’re a mummy,” he said.

“With this hair?” Faye tossed her inky-black locks back. “Not a chance.”

“What’s in the envelopes?” he asked.

She opened one. It was empty.

“I couldn’t think what to write, even to pretend,” she said.

They walked around the gym, getting candy from the plastic cauldrons set up here and there. Everyone was in costume except for Wunder, but even in masks and face paint and wigs, he recognized each kid there. By now, he had delivered letters to dozens of their family members: to Charlotte Atkins’s mother and to Ivo Reis’s grandfather and to Mason Nash’s uncle. And if he kept delivering letters, Wunder realized that eventually, at some point in their lives, every single one of his classmates would get their own. Each person in this room would experience a miracle, maybe many miracles. And each, he knew, would experience a terrible, terrible loss.