“I don’t know how,” I tell her. “I don’t know that I can.”

“You called me up, didn’t you?”

“I guess. But does that mean they’ll be like you? Or will they be real?”

“I think I am real now. At least here, in this place.”

“You know what I mean. Will it really be them, or only my memory of them?”

She nods to show she understands what I’m asking, but all she can say is, “I don’t know.”

And I guess that’s where we have to leave it. I don’t know, and she doesn’t know, and there’s no one else around to ask.

She reaches out and touches my temple with gentle hands, pushes some errant curls back to join the rest of the bird’s nest of tangles that’s my hair.

“Be careful,” she says.

“You, too.”

And then she’s walking away.

I stand and watch her go for a long time, until she’s just a tiny figure and then finally gone, before I turn and head off in the opposite direction.

The forest is quiet around me. I know from previous visits that there’s a whole other world in the topmost branches, filled with all kinds of wildlife eking out a living on boughs as broad as a county road. But down here, the stillness is absolute except for my soft passage across a carpet of mulch.

There’s no undergrowth, so it’s easy to make my way. If the trees’ trunks weren’t so big—you could hide a city bus behind some of them—it would be easy to keep an eye out for danger, too. But I don’t expect danger here. There’s something about these cathedral trees that won’t allow it. I felt it when I was here before, and I feel it now. The last time I was here, all the trouble I got into waited until I was out of the Greatwood before it made itself known.

But even so, I’m hesitant about calling out, as my erstwhile companion suggested. I figure it’s one thing to mouse my way among these giant trees, disturbing no one as I go, and quite another to be shouting out the names of Toby or the crow girls. Besides, any calling out to them probably needs to be done silently, the way I called up the echo of the White Deer Woman, because I certainly don’t remember speaking her name aloud. Or even calling out to her at all. I just fell asleep drunk and then here I was, and here she was, too.