I pick up the shards of glass one by one and toss them into the trash. Feeling just as broken. Just as worthless as honey smeared onto the floor.

Upstairs, the loft is empty—no sign of Oliver—just like Suzy said. And I sit on the edge of the bed.

The house feels oddly vacant now, only echoes and exhales and settling floorboards. I’m all alone. And the guilt folds over me like an old blanket—torn fibers and threads unraveling and stinking of mothballs. I never should have said those things to Suzy. Even if I don’t believe her, even if she knows what happened that night but isn’t saying, I never meant to be so mean.

I pull out the pocket watch and hold it in my hand, running my thumb over the engraving of Max’s name. The broken chain falls between my fingers—a clue I don’t understand. There is no blood on the watch. No tiny spots of red scattered across the glass. And there was no blood on Oliver when I found him in the woods. Blood can be wiped off, I think. But not easily. Not when you’re lost in the forest, freezing to death.

Something else happened. I just can’t see it. Can’t make the pieces fit.

A moth follows you, Mr. Perkins said when I left his house, the bone moth fluttering up into the trees. Always close.

Death is coming for me.

But I don’t want to end up like Max. A corpse—lies buzzing around like flies.

I pick up the spellbook from the bedside table and set it in my lap, flipping through the pages. I don’t know what I’m looking for: an explanation, a remedy, a way to make the bone moth stop following me. To destroy it, maybe. To keep death at bay.

I read the stories of my ancestors, the strange accounts of years past: the autumn a palomino horse went missing inside the Wicker Woods, and Dodie Walker found it using a water-witching stick. She rode the horse out of the woods bareback, and locals said her eyes had turned the same mustard brown as the horse’s. The summer a plague of prairie locusts descended over Jackjaw Lake, covering porch lights and spilling down chimneys. It wasn’t until Colette Walker caught one of the locusts inside a glass jar and muttered a tiny spell into its ear that the air finally cleared and the prairie locusts left the mountains.

Near the bottom of the page there is a notation about the best way to lure an insect into the loft:

• Open window after sunrise.
• Burn a blue-lavender candle to its nub, to lure insect.
• Catch insect in a glass jar and whisper desired spell into its ear.
• *spell not advisable for those who fear creatures of a winged or creepy-crawly sort