Officer Soto looked uncomfortable. “I know you’re concerned,” he said. “But, well, Wunder was having problems before. It’s not the first time I’ve had to come to your house.”

This wasn’t what Wunder’s mother wanted to hear. She started yelling again. She started to cry. And that made Wunder feel terrible, but he was still trying to understand what had been said and what it meant for him. What it meant for his miracle.

“What about the tree branch?” he asked. No one heard him over the yelling. “What about the tree branch?” he shouted.

Officer Soto tried to crack his knuckles again, but nothing happened. “Well, that was a piece of public property,” he said. “There are laws letting you cut down Christmas trees in certain areas and laws letting you chop trees for firewood, but there’s no—you can’t—” For a moment, Officer Soto’s mouth moved, but no words came out. His hands opened in a what-can-I-say gesture. Then he said, “You can’t chop up any tree you like. In a graveyard and everything. I have to—I’m going to have to take the tree branch. I can’t do anything else.”

After all that, Wunder wasn’t even going to get the branch. He wasn’t going to be able to give it to the witch.

But what did it matter anyway? What had he thought the branch was going to do? Why had he thought the witch wanted it? She invites funeral attendees in … spying on them … coerce them into giving her money.

It seemed like nothing had been what he wanted it to be. It seemed like everything had been exactly as it appeared to be.

The bird was just a bird.

The tree was just a tree.

And the witch? She was just an old woman living in an old, abandoned house.

Nothing more.

“I don’t know what to tell you right now, Wunder,” Wunder’s mother said. “I don’t know what to think. You would never have done anything like this before.”

Wunder’s exhaustion had caught up to him. The heaviness in the room, the weight of his mother’s grief and his father’s helplessness—it was all pressing against him so hard. He had tried to make things better, but everything was worse now, far worse. He didn’t want to try anymore.

“I guess we’ve all changed,” he said.

Then he went to his room, and he shut the door. He shut the door on all of them.

Part Six

QUESTIONS

Chapter 38

Wunder lay in bed that night, and everything was confusing in his heart, loud in his heart. He didn’t know what to think. He didn’t know how he felt.

And then he did. He knew exactly how he felt. He felt the way he had when Milagros had died. He felt like she had died all over again.

And he knew why.

He had let himself think there were miracles. He had let himself think that, somehow, his sister could come back. That she had come back. That he wasn’t alone. That this horrible, terrible, overwhelmingly awful thing hadn’t happened to him, hadn’t happened to his family. But it had.