Meanwhile, I feel completely rejuvenated. Maybe it was the stars or the breeze or the spray off the lake, but I feel alive again. I reach up to touch the knot, overcome with this sense that it is gone, that life has returned to normal. Relief spreads through me even as I raise my hand—if it’s not there, you and I can go home. Our life can go on. I can almost taste the hope.

But the knot remains. It feels harder than before, almost brittle. And instead of it shifting when I touch it, I can feel where its roots have lodged into my skull. The sensation makes me shiver. I wish I wouldn’t have touched it. I wish I wouldn’t have checked on it.

Tom and I walk up the dock to the cabin. The recently fallen leaves swish and crackle under our feet, and rising from the ground is that smell of the woods before winter, that smell of dirt and decay racing to finish its work before the first freeze. We make no attempt at silence. We check the deck door and Tom rattles the handle loudly, proving to me that he kept it locked, that there is no way you could have gone inside, even if you possessed the miraculous ability to come all this way. The two of us turn and walk to the other side of the cabin, which seems much bigger now that we are standing under its nighttime shadow. There is, in my mind, nothing to be afraid of.

Until we turn the corner, because there before us is the front door, open.

Tom looks frustrated that this open door could even possibly go along with the idea of you being here, so he peeks his head inside and shouts your name. We listen. Nothing.

Where have you gone?

“Satisfied?” Tom asks.

I stand there in the silence as he takes out his keys and locks the door. I lean my head back and take in the trees. The stars are slowly vanishing, disintegrating into nothingness as clouds sift into the sky above us.

“We should go.” Tom clears his throat and seems to be making an attempt at some sort of peace between us. “There’s a storm coming. Maybe Pearl has already come home.”

While I would stay out all night looking for you, storm or no storm, his words remind me that you do normally return home on your own, in your own time. I nod, and we make our way to the back of the cabin, the dock, the boat, and the lake.

“I really don’t know what to do with her,” I admit. It is my own peace offering, and he takes it.

“Children can be . . .” He glances at me, keeps walking. “Children can be hard to understand. Their minds don’t work the way ours do. They don’t have the same inhibitions, the same fears, the same concerns. The future, in the minds of many children, barely exists. All that is, is here, now.”