I walk to the closet and change into black sweatpants and a thick, knobby sweater. But Suzy stays at the window, pressing her palm to the glass. “You said you found that missing boy?” she asks.

I close the closet door, catching my reflection in the closet mirror briefly—sleepy eyes and hair that needs to be brushed. “Up in the woods,” I say cautiously.

Locals know of the Wicker Woods. They speak about it in a hush, in tones never above a whisper. As if saying it aloud will draw the darkness out. Never speak of the Wicker Woods behind its back, a notation inside the spellbook warns.

“He survived out there all this time?” she asks, dropping her hand from the window.

“He got lucky,” I say. Or maybe it’s opposite of luck. To find yourself lost inside the Wicker Woods is catastrophically unlucky. One of the ill-fated, my grandmother would say if she were here. Doomed. A boy to steer clear of.

An itch trickles down my vertebrae, cold as ice, lodging itself like concrete in my chest.

“He could have ended up like that other boy,” Suzy says.

My gaze snaps to hers, her silhouette outlined against the huge windows, snow swirling against the glass. “What other boy?”

She lifts one shoulder. “The one who died.” She swivels around to face me. “The same night your boy went missing.”

He’s not my boy, I want to say. But instead I ask, “A boy died?”

Her mouth pinches flat and severe. “Yeah, the night of the storm.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t know. Just overheard the other boys talking about it. They wanted to call the police, but the phones have been down.”

I step closer to her. “Who was he?”

“Not sure.” She weaves a bit of hair through her fingers. Not nervously, just out of habit. “They kept it pretty quiet, no one wanted to talk about it. But I overheard their whispers in the hall, when they thought I couldn’t hear.”

“Did they say how he died?” I ask. My lungs have tightened in my chest, the breath held still at the back of my throat.

She shakes her head, her eyebrows drawn close—wincing at the thought of someone meeting their demise way out here, in these woods, in the bitter cold. “I only heard them say that a boy was missing and another was dead.”

I sink onto the edge of the bed, looking past Suzy to the window. “Someone died,” I say softly, mostly to my myself, and I run my finger over my grandmother’s ring, feeling the oval shape of the gray moonstone. As if I could summon her, hear the soothing tenor of her words whenever she told me one of her stories. But she doesn’t appear.