Page 54

After leaving Tayla, I’m the first to break the silence. “We can never tell anyone the wishing well is real,” I say. I look at Radhika. “Absolutely no one. We have to protect it. We have to do what Henry Prior should have done from the start: left it alone.”

Kiara surprises me when she says, “I destroyed it. It should stay that way.”

“But it’s part of our history,” Radhika protests. “Nova…”

“And how many more have to die or go missing?” asks Evan. “Better to keep it a secret.”

Radhika falls silent. Keiffer puts an arm around her shoulder.

“They’re right. We have to keep people safe from it and it safe from people.

If people know we undid Kiara’s bad luck, they’ll never stop looking for it.

Maybe they’ll even try to rebuild it. It’s a myth, it’s a legend, and one day it won’t even be history anymore. It’ll just be forgotten.”

She gives a jerky nod, but I don’t know how much she believes it.

“It’s the right thing to do,” I tell her, and if she believes nothing else, I hope she believes me . “In your heart of hearts, you know it, too.”

When we emerge from the woods, there’s so much activity bustling everywhere around us that it takes me a moment to acclimate myself. It seems like half the town is here, but how? Why?

Austin and Caroline stand with their parents and ours.

Aurora is twisting her ring round and round her finger as she hovers by an ambulance.

She seems oblivious to everything going on around her, wholly focused on the trees, like she’s waiting for someone.

Her whole face is naked with longing, a heartbreaking mix of hopeful and desperate.

Otto and Petra are pouring drinks for the gathering crowd.

The scent of hot chocolate wafts over to us.

Evan gnaws at their lower lip. “You don’t think they’re here for us, do you?”

“What do you think is going on?” Kiara whispers. We’re still holding hands.

“I don’t know,” I whisper back.

I turn around, half expecting to see Tayla hovering just out of sight. But she’s already gone. Heart heavy, I step out into the glow of dozens of headlights.

Caroline audibly gasps and tugs at my mother’s arm, pointing to all of us illuminated there against the darkness. All the other parents start scanning our Fellowship for their child, too.

Mom sees me first. “Nova!” she screams. She abandons the bearded man with a blanket draped over his shoulders and a paramedic checking his eyesight.

She barrels right into me, sobbing into my neck, which I’m sure smells horrifying after the past four days, but she takes a deep inhale as though none of it matters.

As though I’m not totally grounded for infinity after this.

But honestly, if she never lets me leave her sight again, I think I might be okay with that.

I cling to my mom, which is a little tough with Kiara’s hand still tangled between us.

With a teary smile, she extricates herself from the awkward embrace.

And then Austin and Caroline and Otto and Petra are there, hugging and kissing and love-scolding until we’re all a giant blubbering mess.

“We wouldn’t have survived without him,” a man says to Petra as he accepts his drink.

Wrapping both scarred hands around the cup, he nods to the bearded man.

“The other men tried to rule like kings, but we refused to live like they did. We mostly stuck to the caves. Made our home there. He knows about foraging and medicinal plants. No one knows the forest better than him. He never let us give up on our humanity, even those of us who had already lost our lives.”

“And he was one of the few who managed to stay alive,” a woman adds. Her face is weathered, and she’s gray before her time, but there’s joy in her voice when she says, “He said he had to, for his little girl.”

A woman a little younger than her with the same blue eyes and thin lips, says, “We already told the police how we all tried to leave, but we kept getting turned around every time. No one tried more than him. Especially after his friend ate those poisoned mushrooms and died so horribly…” She shudders.

“I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly, whatever was stopping him from finding his way out?

It didn’t exist anymore. He remembered how to leave and took us with him. He saved us.”

I hear all the conversations going on around us, but when Mom opens her mouth, it all fades to white noise.

“Nova,” Mom repeats again, then again and again. As though my name is her lodestone. She laughs through tears. She withdraws but only enough so she can look at my face, caress my cheek, and hold her forehead against mine. “Our North Star,” she breathes.

My head jerks. What did she just say? I haven’t heard that in—

“Sweetheart,” says Mom. “You won’t believe who’s come home.”

My eyes fly to the man waiting for her. For us. He’s older now. There are abrasions on his face. Tiny white scars, too, that stand out starkly against his dirty skin. Nothing about him is familiar.

Until he raises his hand to greet me and I see what’s tattooed on his skin.

My eyes meet Kiara’s, who’s squished between her parents.

They keep alternating between hugging and sobbing.

Sometimes both at once. We break eye contact only when her parents drag her to get checked out by the paramedic.

A middle-aged couple with ginger hair and piercing blue eyes rake their eyes through the crowd, and then, having come to some sort of realization, hasten after Kiara.

I don’t know whether tomorrow will bring her good luck or bad luck.

But we saved her. We did some good for those who were left behind.

We’ll give the police directions to go back out there and see what remains they can find.

Some closure for the families. For Aurora, who will finally know the truth: her fiancé never abandoned her.

I like to think that he loved her until his last breath.

But I don’t want to think about that now. We just made it out of there; even in my own head, I don’t want the forest to claim me as it so very nearly did.

“Dad,” I say.

“My Super Nova,” he says with a tenderness I still don’t think I deserve but I desperately need.

I don’t know who reaches for who first, who starts crying first, whose legs buckle until we’re both huddled on the ground.

“I’m so sorry, Daddy,” I say into his neck.

His shirt is stained, woodsmoke saturating the entire fabric.

Holes on the sleeves, threads hanging loose on his collar.

He’s sweaty and grimy, but he’s still my dad, and his arms are around me, and the only thought in my head is that everything is going to be okay .

“Shhh,” he says, pressing a kiss to my hair.

I cry harder. “It was my fault. I should never have said those things. Never have told you to go.”

“You were a child.” His voice breaks. “It was never your fault.”

“But I—”

Dad doesn’t let me finish. “It was never your fault,” he says firmly.

“Oh, Nova.” Mom joins us on the ground, face splotchy. “You carried that all this time?”

“I said the words.” My voice shakes. “Me.”

Fine! Go, then! If you love the woods so much, stay there forever! I hope you never come back!

Even now, the words are suspended between us. I don’t repeat them for fear of what they’ll do.

But Dad must have explained this to Mom because her face softens, the worry lines on her face easing.

She goes on to explain that when hordes of people started staggering through the woods, most dazed and disassociated and dirt-stained, Austin and Caroline had tried to radio me.

When they couldn’t get through, they ran to the town for help.

Apparently Austin had panicked at first, thinking it was the start of the zombie apocalypse (because of course he did).

And when all our parents got there, he explained what we were really doing in the woods.

“You’re not mad?” I ask.

“Of course I’m mad,” says Mom. “I’m furious.”

“Oh.”

“But I’m also proud of my baby girl.”

I jerk my head up and stare. She smiles and chucks me under the chin.

“Your words matter, Nova,” says Dad. The deep grooves on his forehead and the little scars marring his face and knuckles are a testament to his time away from us.

A reminder of my guilt. “But so do your actions. I know you’ll choose your words with more care in the future, and I also know you’ll do your best to set things right when you don’t.

I’m grateful to be back here with my family, but more than that, I’m grateful you stayed full of wonder.

You were so young…I was afraid that the world would try and take it from you. ”

I’m about to tell him that he’s wrong, that the world did take it, and then I realize that I clawed it back. I might have let my wonder waver, but it was still mine. It returned to me. The wonder is part of me, just like Dad and the Longing Woods and the occasional magic of Prior’s End.

“Never,” I say, the word bubbling out through a laugh-sob, and it’s the truth.

The stars are alight in the sky, Kiara is saved, and Dad is back.

A little older, a little more battered, but back .

Dad was right in what he said all those years ago about being responsible for our friends.

The Fellowship isn’t broken. We will not forsake Tayla to her fate. We don’t need the wishing well.

We are bound by this quest and by each other and by those we’ve left behind. By the secret we keep and will always keep. Even without the wishing well, we will find another way. There is, after all, still some magic left in this world.

“Let’s go home,” says Mom. We all struggle to our feet, Mom letting Dad lean on her for support. He’s lost weight, but there’s quiet strength in his face.

I see that same strength in Kiara’s face when I seek her out in the crowd.

In Evan’s face. In Radhika’s. In Keiffer’s. In Austin’s. In Caroline’s.

And then I land on Aurora. She approaches us, looking more haggard than I’ve ever seen her. Older than Mom. Every bit of her sparkle is gone. My anger toward her has deflated, and all I’m left with is a sadness that she’s lived with her grief this long.

My breath catches. “Aurora…”

“They’re saying Austin’s father is dead,” she says.

“He is,” says Dad, and I can hear how the words cost him. “Not long ago. He ate some poisonous mushrooms. We don’t know how it happened. Or what happened to him after.”

“I was waiting for my Mickey.” Her eyes land on me.

She picks at her fingernails, which I see now are bloodied.

“It would have been two decades this year. I always thought if I kept coming back here, maybe one day he’d be the one waiting for me.

” Her eyes glitter with unshed tears as she waits for me to confirm something I think she already suspects.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “His friends weren’t his friends.”

“I’m sorry, Nova. I know you’ve never liked me, but I tried to be a good friend to your mom.

We both lost the men we loved.” I see her smile at my parents, a genuine smile that’s so full of love and grief that my own heart pinches.

I know it must hurt that Mickey wasn’t one of the ones to survive, to make it back to her.

Suddenly, the hope she imbued in Mom over the past seven years makes sense.

Aurora never gave up on her fiancé, either.

I glance at my parents. Mom gives me a tiny nod. “Would you like to come back home with us?” I ask. Maybe it’s unfair of me, but I can’t chance telling her about the well. Can’t risk that she’ll try to make the trip and rebuild something we’ve all agreed is best left as ruins.

But I can give her this. “I…I don’t know if it will bring you any measure of peace, but I can tell you where his body is. And what happened.”

And at some point, the authorities will go to the glade and recover all the backpacks and identify the ones who did not make it out of the forest. Hold a memorial. Honor the dead.

But tonight and tomorrow and maybe even the day after that is for my family. Mine. Whole at long last. I toss one last glance at the woods before following Mom to our car.

But after that, I think it might be time for another adventure. Time to save another friend.

Wish us luck.