If I'd known in the moment at the airport when I said goodbye to Henry that I was making a choice that would change the rest of my life, the path I'd chosen revealed itself to me pretty quickly.

During my first two nights back in Tampa at my father's house, the smoke detector in my bedroom kept blipping. Dad replaced the battery but the annoying noise continued, disrupting my sleep and making me strongly suspect if someone or something was trying to catch my attention by manipulating electricity. But that was illogical; we'd burned down the rose bush that had originated the evil of the curse (as well as practically half of the square footage of our town).

Similar in its strangeness, the tiny down feathers inside of my pillow kept pushing through the lining, jabbing me ever-so-slightly whenever I rested my head. The pillow was relatively new; Dad had bought it when I'd come to stay with him and Rhonda back in January. Feathers, I kept thinking to myself. Why in the world would I be tormented by feathers?

The answer revealed itself to me on Sunday morning, when I read the weekly edition of the Weeping Willow Gazette online. Firefighter Patrick J. Wennings had been one of two firemen killed on the job fighting the blaze at Tallmadge Woods. He was survived by his wife Becky and daughter Heather—who, the obituary writer mentioned, was affectionately called Feather by her father.

When I'd first met Laura in Chicago at the bookstore where she worked, she'd told me that eventually I would find a use for my ability to communicate with people who had died. The mere idea of developing my powers to receive messages had been pretty terrifying. In fact, at the time I'd been pretty focused on trying to get the unwelcomed messages from the other side to stop. But as I sat at Dad and Rhonda's kitchen table with my laptop reading about Patrick J. Wennings, I couldn't help but feel that I was obligated to pass along whatever message he had for his daughter. His death, after all, was kind of my fault.

And so in using the silver orchid pendulum from Henry to receive that first fateful message, I began a crash course in paranormal communication research. Without asking me any weird questions, Rhonda drove me to and from meetings of a paranormal investigation group in nearby Largo. Although most of the group's six dedicated members were total weirdos, I recognized almost immediately that the group's founder, a retired chiropractor named Walter, had the same keen sense of when a spirit was present that I did. Every weekend that spring, we wandered through abandoned homes snooping for disturbances and answered emails from locals claiming that their homes were haunted. We never found any real hauntings that we were able to confirm, but within a few years I'd find out exactly what it was like to step inside a space that was truly menaced by an evil entity.

In June when I returned back to Weeping Willow, Trey picked me up at the airport. He'd miraculously grown his hair out again and had put on some weight. Unexpectedly, he'd found an ally and mentor in good old Coach Stirling. Believing that he had a knack for fixing cars worthy of investment, she used the money that she received from her homeowner's insurance for damage incurred during the tornado to buy a commercial insurance policy required for opening an auto body shop. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, Coach Stirling rented a garage with her girlfriend not far from where Mischa's dad's old car dealership used to be, and she hired Trey as an apprentice mechanic. He spent the spring studying how to rebuild engines. Of course, this job (which was the closest thing to a dream job Trey would ever have) required him to face his fear of driving.

"Mercedes mechanic training?" I repeated dubiously as we drove from Green Bay back to town in the used Civic that Trey had bought for himself.

"Yeah," he said enthusiastically. "It's a two-year program if I take the accelerated courses. Once I get certified, I can probably get a job anywhere, you know. Anywhere in the world where people drive Mercedes."

It made my heart flutter to see a sparkle in his eyes again. He'd sounded excited about what he was doing back in Weeping Willow whenever we spoke on the phone, but I hadn't imagined that he'd recovered from the insanity we'd endured over the winter this much. "Two years is a long time," I said. "Where would you have to go to take the training?"

"Well, I was thinking," Trey said as we passed the green highway marker indicating that we were entering Weeping Willow, Wisconsin. "There's an accredited program at the University of South Florida in Tampa. I could come down to Florida and live near you while you finish your senior year..."

"YES!" I exclaimed, not needing to hear another word. I had missed Trey so desperately while I'd been away from Wisconsin that I'd already talked to my high school principal about taking two extra classes in the fall so that I could graduate in December. Even though I was ecstatic that all of the nasty business with the evil curse in Weeping Willow was over, it was damn near impossible to go back to the humdrum routine of high school after everything I'd experienced with Trey, Mischa, and Henry.

"Your dad is going to be thrilled," Trey teased as he flipped on his turn signal.

A lot of surprises awaited me in Weeping Willow that June after my two months away. Cheryl had told me in her emails that Violet Simmons had withdrawn from classes immediately after her father's funeral. She and her mother had fled town and returned to the Chicagoland area, not even waiting for their house to sell before taking off. The mansion and all of the trees along the private drive which Henry and I had once plotted to burn down had been razed. Trey and I drove past to find several huge construction trucks and stacks of cement blocks piled at the center of the property. Nothing at all remained of the mansion where I'd once baked cupcakes with Violet after school—not a single brick. Even the gates that had once kept trespassers from stepping onto the property had been removed.

According to Cheryl, Pete had wasted no time after Violet's abrupt departure to start dating a sophomore who looked a lot like Olivia Richmond. Just like Trey had told me the morning that the fire burned down Tallmadge Woods, people were eager to put the strange events of that year behind them. The woods didn't even had a chance to grow back; business developers took advantage of the damage by buying the property and building a golf resort.

Mischa returned to California to finish her training, but the amount of practice she'd missed during her impromptu trip back home to Wisconsin had taken its toll on her preparedness for the Olympic trials. Even though she qualified for the team, it was Amanda who took home a silver medal that year. The media still had a field day promoting the two pretty sisters from Wisconsin, and Mischa returned home to Weeping Willow a star. However, her interest in continuing her training for another four years waned during senior year when all of the other students at St. Monica's were filling out their college applications. Despite her mother's objections, she enrolled at Beloit with Matt and they were married shortly after receiving their undergraduate degrees.

As part of the town's extensive tornado recovery efforts, the mayor's office finally made good on its intention to turn the empty lot on the corner of Martha's Road into a children's park. Before the end of the summer, construction had begun. Whether Mom was sad about it or ambivalent was impossible to tell; she didn't exhibit any emotion on the topic. In the fall, not long after I returned to Florida with Trey for my senior year of high school, Mom put our house up for sale and moved in with Glenn. Although they never ended up getting married, every time I visited them after high school graduation, it seemed more to me like they'd been together forever.

In the years that followed, the investment firm that bought the Simmons' property built a multiplex movie theater on the site where the house once stood, with a Bennigan's Bar & Grill and an expensive bowling alley within the entertainment complex. For the first time ever, people actually drove from Ortonville into Weeping Willow to spend money. I liked to think that Candace Cotton would have been very excited about our hometown getting a bit of its own glamour. However, after the tornado touched down, I never heard from Candace again. Isaac Johnston played college football for the University of Iowa and was drafted by the Green Bay Packers. If she was keeping an eye on things from heaven, I'm sure Candace was very happy for her former flame.

During the months when Trey lived at home before leaving town, his mother nagged him persistently about claiming his half of Michael Simmons' fortune, money that she considered to be rightfully his. I didn't ask Trey what he'd done with the contract from Michael Simmons until years later, when we were living together in South Carolina where I was attending veterinary school. Trey said matter-of-factly that he'd torn it up, of course. It had freaked him out to even be carrying around words that promised to transfer more trouble his way. Neither of us were ever able to figure out what the catch was with Mr. Simmons' offer, although we both whole-heartedly agreed that Violet's father was not the kind of guy who would have gladly given Trey eight grand a month for nothing in exchange.

So much in our small town had changed in such a short period of time that I often thought of how wise we'd been in our selection of a safe place to hide the jar in which Laura had locked the curse. In his final act of lawbreaking, Trey had buried that jar alongside Olivia Richmond's grave in the St. Monica's cemetery, knowing that the chances of someone else digging around there and disturbing caskets were pretty unlikely. It had been my idea, primarily because I knew that if the jar were ever to be unearthed, Olivia's spirit would find a way to warn me. Obviously this was not something either of us could tell Henry. For a while, I'd receive a postcard every few weeks at my dad's house in Tampa. Henry never wrote anything on them more than basic greetings like, "Hello from France." For a while, it was a comfort to keep in touch, and then it just became a source of sadness for both of us.

I never intended to use my paranormal research as a means of making money, but when Trey and I relocated to Charleston for my graduate school studies, there was a thriving market of potential customers eager to pay me for assistance in reaching out to spirits that refused to leave old homes. Unlike the alleged hauntings about which we'd get calls back in Florida, Charleston was rife with the spirits of rueful slave masters, scorned women, and Civil War soldiers. Trey was fully supportive of my fledgling small business. He built me a modest website and accompanied me to meet customers to make sure that I wasn't being lured into the homes of mass murderers.

We both loved South Carolina, primarily because it was so very different from Wisconsin, although we both silently acknowledged that we probably wouldn't remain there for too long. After leaving Weeping Willow that August to follow me down to Florida, Trey never ventured up to Wisconsin again. As far as I knew, he never spoke to his mom again, either. When I graduated from high school in Florida in December, a year after the snowstorm that had blanketed Weeping Willow, neither of us even considered moving back up to the Wisconsin area. When I'd return to visit Mom and Glenn in Ortonville, I found myself avoiding the roads that led back toward Weeping Willow until I stopped driving through town entirely. I knew that Mom still visited Jennie's grave regularly and always would; it would only distress her if I told her that I had no reason to pay respects at a gravesite because I communicated with my sister on a regular basis.

However, at night, in my dreams, I found myself back in town often. In those dreams I was always sixteen again, and it was always autumn. The leaves on the trees along Front Road were just starting to yellow and drift to the sidewalk. It was warm—summer temperatures, and tans had not yet faded. In the high school art room, Michael Walton and Tracy Hartford supervised a team of volunteers in creating posters announcing the Homecoming dance. Stephanie diMilo and Abby Johanssen led the pom pon squad in practicing their cheers out on the football field—swinging ponytails and big smiles! And across town, on Cabot Drive, I walked with four girls toward Olivia's house carrying shopping bags from the mall in Ortonville. Olivia was always in the lead, excitedly describing the shoes she hoped to find in time for the dance. One of the girls, Violet, was new in town, and I was never quite able to see her face clearly.

Whenever I had that dream I'd bolt upright in bed in a cold sweat, and Trey wouldn't have to ask what was wrong. Throughout my childhood I had thought that Weeping Willow would always be my home, but I'd come to understand that home isn't always a place on a map. It's the space in between words that don't even need to be spoken, it's the exact color of the eyes of the person you love, and knowing that nothing is powerful enough to ever take that person away from you.

THE END