I reach out and grab his arm. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but I thought I saw…”

He pulls his arm away from me. “What? What did you see? I didn’t see anything. It was an empty road and you just screamed. You grabbed the wheel and drove straight toward the wall.” He shakes his head. “You’d drifted off—one minute you were asleep, the next all hell broke loose.” He looks away from me to where my dad, a nurse, and a uniformed police officer walk toward us. He leans down to whisper in my ear. “But don’t worry. I told the police you must have grabbed the wheel to avoid an animal or something. I didn’t see anything but…tell them that. Tell them you did it to avoid hitting a dog or a cat or something. You don’t need to be in more trouble than you already are.”

“I’m sorry,” I say as my dad and the policeman reach me. I don’t know whether I’m apologizing to Dad, to Max, or to the police.

“There was a cat,” I say. “I saw a cat in the road and I acted instinctively. I don’t know what happened.”

I turn my head away and it explodes with pain. I close my eyes and feel myself drifting. I don’t want to because the woods are there, waiting for me in my dreams. They’re always waiting.

The hospital is quiet. I don’t know what time it is, but when I close my eyes, I see a house made of bones, ghosts haunting every room. As I drift, I find myself walking through the woods toward Dean House and I sense Bella next to me. I can smell dirt and blood and dead leaves. I can hear something dripping on the ground and I won’t turn my head to look at her because I’m scared of what I might see.

“Let me tell you a story,” Bella says.

“Stop it, Bella,” I say. “I don’t like your stories.”

“That’s because they’re not really stories.”

“Maybe there’d be more happy endings if they were.”

She brings her death-smell closer and I close my eyes. “Listen. Let me tell you about the time two girls went into the woods and only one came out…”

I wake with a gasp and sit up, hunched over in the bed. No, no, no, I don’t like that dream.

Dad picks me up from the hospital.

“I’m so sorry,” I say as I climb into the passenger seat, doing up my seat belt with shaking hands. “How’s Max? How’s his car?”