Officer Soto shook his head. “She’s been real quiet there. We’ve been keeping an eye on her, doing a patrol past the house every now and then. Had to tell your friend—the one with the cape thing?”

“Faye,” Wunder said.

“Yeah,” Officer Soto said. “Had to tell her to leave yesterday. She called me ‘Officer Mundane.’ Said I was an agent of the banal and humdrum. Sort of screamed it at me, actually.”

Wunder nodded. “That sounds like her.”

“Well, anyway, there it is.” He gestured toward the other end of the porch, where Wunder now saw the tree branch had been all along, leaning against the house, listening as its fate was decided. “Like I said, do what you want with it, but don’t give it to the DoorWay House lady. That wouldn’t look good—you know, for me. And anyway, it’s for your sister, right? Whatever you were planning to do with it, do that. For her.”

Chapter 41

Wunder sat on the porch for a long time after Tomás’s dad left. He sat on the porch and stared at the tree branch. Against the white wood of the house, the branch looked dark, but it wasn’t the deep black it had seemed in Benedict. It was duller, a charcoal-gray color. Its flowers were gone. Its bark was a rough, peeling patchwork and beneath it, Wunder could see the spiraling grain.

He sat and stared at the tree branch as evening turned into night. Its wood grew darker and darker. Its spirals grew lighter and lighter.

They didn’t spin though. Of course they didn’t.

Wunder thought about what he’d told Tomás, about what Officer Soto had said—that the branch was for his sister. And it was true. He had wanted the tree branch for Milagros, for the sister he had loved and lost so quickly. Everything he had done—breaking into the town hall and entering the DoorWay House, delivering the letters and talking with the witch and stealing the branch—it had all been for her.

And also for himself. He had wanted a miracle so badly. He had wanted an answer, a sign. He had wanted to know that the world wasn’t truly so harsh and hard, that people weren’t truly so alone, that everything didn’t truly end so abruptly and awfully and heartbreakingly.

And he thought about the last entry in The Miraculous. The entry that he had not wanted to read or think about. He didn’t have The Miraculous anymore; who knew what Davy had done with it.

But it didn’t matter. He knew what the last entry said: