“I called you a bad mom. Do you remember that?” Shame dampened her voice. “Then when you disappeared, I figured you’d decided that you thought we deserved better than you or something.”

The truck bounced over a bump in the road. Zadie instinctually tightened her grip on Nora’s shoulder.

“You were a good mom. I’m sorry it took so long for me to say it.” She paused. “There’s something else I have to tell you…”

Nora waited.

“I’m pregnant.”

Zadie thought she saw a Mona Lisa–esque smile play across her mom’s lips, but when she blinked, it was gone.

“You’re the first person I’ve told.” It was then that Zadie realized why she hadn’t told anyone else about her pregnancy, not even Finn. It was because she’d always pictured telling her mom first.

“Are you seeing this?” Jenna called back to her from the cab. Zadie turned around and saw that the starlings had gotten ahead of them and had converged into one dark mass that twisted and turned like shifting sand. “A murmuration,” Zadie said, awestruck. She’d seen one once before when she was young. Nora had pointed it out to her as they sat on the roof of their garage one summer eating Popsicles. She turned back to her mother. “Is this you?”

Nora neither confirmed nor denied Zadie’s claim, but she watched the birds intently.

“Can you get us over there?” Zadie called to her aunt.

“I can get us close.” Jenna punched the accelerator and the truck bounced over the rutted dirt road, tree branches slapping against the windshield. It wasn’t long before they burst out of the cover of the trees, and the road came to an abrupt end in a grassy plain. As Jenna slammed on the brakes, the murmuration swept dramatically over their heads, then hovered over a cliff that dropped off steeply toward the ocean.

“No…” Zadie gasped. Another cliff. Only this time she didn’t see Finn. Was she too late?

She leaped out of the truck and sprinted to the bluff’s edge, skidding to a stop just before tumbling over the side. “Finn!” she screamed into the waves, but her voice was swallowed up by the sea and thrown against the rocks fifty feet below.

Then her foot nudged something in the grass: the painted rock that Luna had given them. Zadie bent down and picked it up. Hand shaking, she held it over the lip of the bluff. The gray protrusion they’d once thought of as a volcano looked identical in shape to the jagged rocks below and the painted smoke looked instead like sea spray.

Zadie’s knees felt weak. Worried she might pass out, she staggered back from the cliff. Finn. She’d been given a chance to stop her. She’d been given more than one. And now …