And it’s as true as most stories are, which is to say that it is and it isn’t.
It’s true that there is no more Gray. No more bodies. No corrupted trees, apart from the ones that surface sometimes in her nightmares.
Instead, the magic is back where it has always belonged: In the rustle of the leaves as they fall from the trees. In the hawthorn tree’s half-shut eye. In a brief moment when May turns her head and feels something watching her, feels that it is grateful—and then it’s gone.
It lingers in the undead cat that lives inside the town boundaries, still prowling at Violet’s side, in the ruins that Isaac and his brother have set about eradicating, burying their past selves in the dirt.
May knows that it will take a long time for trees to grow, but sometimes she goes out into the forest and helps them anyway. It feels good to get some dirt under her fingernails every once in a while. And it feels good when all five of them show up at parties and the town starts expecting them to arrive together, those founder kids always hanging out, because old habits die hard.
Augusta finds the whole family a therapist. May is skeptical at first, but it helps to talk to a stranger about her father, even though they skirt around some of the details. It allows the three of them to find the words they need to start healing.
She watches her friends get into college and wonders if they’ll keep their promise to remember this once they leave. And then, in late spring, all four of them surprise her.
“It’s everything we could find about the founders,” Violet says, pulling a massive binder out of her tote bag and handing it to May. They’re sitting in the forest, the five of them; reading or on their phones, it doesn’t matter, because they all like to be there. It’s where they feel safe.
May flips the binder open to the first page. It has papers from every family, all put together; it tells the truth, or at least as much of the truth as they can manage, through pictures and letters and handwritten stories and songs. And as May clutches the binder close to her chest, she understands why they have given it to her: because someone has to tell the story. Of the founders who became a monster, and the founders who finally laid it to rest.
She sits beneath the hawthorn tree that night, the Deck of Omens heavy in her hands. The tree itself is healed but scarred, deep divots in the trunk where the veins twisted through it. It will never be the same again, but it still lives, and that is all May could have hoped for.
She hasn’t dared to touch the cards since her ritual all those months ago, not quite ready to think of how that connection between herself and the forest has flickered out.
But she is finally ready to let go.
May takes a deep breath and begins to shuffle as the branches wave above her head. The air smells of springtime and hope, of new beginnings.
And then she feels it: a door creaking open in her mind, something wordless surging through it. It sounds different from the voice she’s heard before, and yet she still recognizes it immediately.
It is the forest she loves so much. It is her birthright. It is her home.
The hawthorn’s slow heartbeat courses through her. And, one by one, the cards begin to disappear.