While Hazel and Rowan bickered, Finn pulled the painted rock out of her pants pocket, felt its heft in her palm. “I’ve wanted to give up, too.”

Rowan gazed up at her. “You have?”

“Yeah.” She reached down from the branches and held the rock out to Rowan. “This rock was supposed to help me find her. I was sure I’d figured it out, but we showed up and nothing happened.”

Rowan examined the stone in her cupped hand. “You went to the coast?”

“It’s not the coast. It’s a volcano.”

Rowan turned the rock a hundred and eighty degrees. “Ohhhh. Right. I see it now,” she said, then passed it back up to Finn.

Finn rotated the rock until it was upside down. Sure enough, it looked like a bird’s-eye view of a craggy coastline. Finn studied the wisp of white paint that had once looked like smoke and now looked like the frothy curl of a wave. Then, before she had time to properly brace herself, she heard a telltale ringing in her ears …

It was her favorite spot. A knobby old pine.

Its bark scratched her bare thighs.

Like saying grace, her fingers threaded together, resting on top of a pumpkin-round belly.

In the branches of a giant maple, two young girls were climbing. Her girls.

“Too high!” Her voice seemed to echo.

The oldest stopped and said something to the youngest. The youngest clung sloth-like to a branch, hair hanging like Spanish moss.

The sky was so bright and clear it seemed to chime.

Sun. Water. Air. Love.

Everything Amy needed to live.

A tap on her arm like a butterfly landing. A woman, face green with bruises, sat beside her.

She said the words beautiful and family. She was talking about hers.

The woman called herself Wren. Amy didn’t think it was her real name.

I could sit here forever, Amy said. Watching them.

Her girls. Her audacious, smart, wild girls.

When Finn opened her eyes, she was facedown. She had been in the tree, and now she was on the ground.

“Finn!” Someone was shouting. Finn rolled onto her back and looked up to see Rowan, Hazel, and Juniper hovering over her. Juniper gave her a light slap on the cheek, a move she’d probably learned from cartoons. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Finn groaned, sitting upright. “Just another echo.”

Rowan helped her to her feet. “What was this one about?”

Finn looked to her left. Thirty feet away, in the middle of the clearing, stood a crooked old pine. Its trunk was squat and gnarled and stooped to one side; its limbs bowed chivalrously low to the ground, bristly clumps of needles clinging to their tips. It wasn’t a pretty tree, but it looked to Finn like the perfect tree to sit on and watch your children play. “Try that one,” she said, nodding in the pine’s direction.