My fingers push into the snow, into the soil, hands burrowing up to my wrists. I need to feel the earth, feel rooted to something that isn’t the endless sinking of the lake. My mouth hangs open a moment, and I want to speak, just to hear my own voice—to know that I’m real—but no words fall out. My body heaves, shivers, and I think I might be sick, but I draw my hands out from the dirt and roll onto my back, staring up at the black, starless sky. I can’t be sure of the hour. But it’s well after sunset—the darkest part of night.

A ringing fills my ears, and I suck in air like it’s never felt so good inside my lungs, greedy for it. Desperate. The wind howls through the trees as if it’s coming from straight up inside me. A wailing cry. A hiss and a sputter.

But I’m not inside the Wicker Woods.

Not deep inside the cruelest part of the forest.

I’m in the trees outside my home, near the shore, near the old, slanted woodshed. The pines towering over me. But I can’t be sure how I got here. Can’t be certain how much time has passed since I fell into the cold, cold lake.

I sit upright, my head wobbling. Snow falling around me.

Yet, if I’m not inside the Wicker Woods, then the lake didn’t bring me back—I am not a lost thing returned, not like Oliver.

Something else happened.

Something that makes my eyelids quiver, drops of lake water suspended on each lash, tiny glassy orbs. While sparks swim across my vision.

There is no smoke in my throat. No embers tumbling through the pines, burning my skin. The trees above me are a deep, mossy green and the air is clear.

There is no wildfire roaring through the forest.

I stand and press my hand against the trunk of a tree, breathing, the cold air tickling my neck. My skin pricked with gooseflesh.

A storm is coming. And the air seesaws at the edge of my vision, vibrating—like déjà vu. The sky a familiar shade of dusky black. A feeling, a memory I can’t pin down, classify, or catalog like one of Mr. Perkins’s framed specimens hanging on his wall.

The ringing in my ears becomes a wail, becomes a scream inside my head. I’ve been here before. I’ve stood in these trees. Snow coming down in thick washes of white.

With trembling fingers, I brush the hair away from my face and feel the weight of something on my finger—my grandmother’s ring. The moonstone a pearly gray, reflecting the sky, as if I never lost it in the lake. It never slipped from my finger.

Something else has happened.