When he says that, I know how I can fix things for him and the rest of the Eadar my younger self pulled out of Wentworth’s book. But that won’t work with Mattie. Just as the healers couldn’t fix my body until I dealt with the monster hidden in my head, I have to help Mattie do the same before I can work any magic for her.

Because some things—the deep, meaningful things that sit at the heart of our souls—can’t be touched by magic. They can only be touched by the hurt or the love that we offer to each other.

That’s the real measure of our worth: How we touch each other in a way that really matters.

Which, I realize, is what the Grace is all about.

I lay the book down on the step and stand up.

“I have to go to her,” I tell Tom.

“I know,” he says.

I walk down the steps and onto the grass. The Eadar open their crowded ranks to make a path for me, but they reach out and touch me as I pass by them. On my arms, on my shoulders, on my back. It’s a curiously empowering experience. I don’t have words for them, they don’t have words for me. But we communicate our joy for each other’s existence without them. That joy flows over us like a wave of light. Like the light that’s supposed to be inside me that I can never see.

I can almost see it now.

I can certainly feel it.

The sensation holds all the way across the yard and follows me through the fields to where the forest begins. But once I’m under the dark boughs of the spruce, my footsteps swallowed by the carpet of needles under my shoes, I’m on my own. I may continue to hold their good will, but the deeper I go into the woods, the less tangible it becomes.

I don’t worry about how I’m going to find Mattie, one small girl in all these acres of dark woods. We’re in a story now—Mattie and I—and the story will lead me to her.

When I find her, she’s sitting among the roots of a huge pine, holding the torn remains of her teddy bear. The pine’s roots twine around a snarl of granite pushed out of the ground by frost.

“What did you do to him?” she asks. “I can’t feel him anymore. Not really. It’s just like there’s a sliver of a memory left, but that’s all.”

“I wrote him out of the story.”

She studies me for a long moment before she asks, “Is that what you’re going to do to me?”

I shake my head.