Full circle. The beginning and the end. Maybe I really had picked a hole in the sky and unraveled the universe. Maybe there was no kind of slipknot or half hitch or taut-line that could ever keep it all from coming undone. Something connected my first glimpse of the button to this one, even though it was just the same old button. Some small bit of universe had stretched from Lena to me to Macon to Amma to my dad and my mom—and even Marian and my Aunt Prue—back to me again. I guess Liv and John Breed were in there somewhere, and maybe Link and Ridley. Maybe all of Gatlin was.

Did it matter?

When I saw Lena for the very first time at school, how could I possibly have known where this was all headed? And if I had, would I have changed a single thing? I doubted it.

I picked up the silver button carefully. The second my fingers touched it they moved more slowly, as if I had plunged my hand to the bottom of the lake. I felt the weight of the worthless tin like it was a pile of bricks.

I put it back on the cross, but it rolled off the edge, falling onto the mounded dirt of the grave. I was too tired to try to move it again. If someone else was here, would they have seen the button move? Or did it only seem like that to me? Either way, that button was hard to look at. I hadn’t thought about what it would feel like to visit my own grave. And I wasn’t ready to rest, in peace or not.

I wasn’t ready for any of this.

I’d never really thought past the whole dying-for-the-sake-of-the-world part of things. When you’re alive, you don’t dwell on how you’re going to spend your time once you’re dead. You just figure you’re gone, and the rest will pretty much take care of itself.

Or you think you’re not really going to die. You’re going to be the first person in the history of the world who doesn’t have to. Maybe that’s some kind of lie our brains tell us to keep us from going crazy while we’re alive.

But nothing’s that simple.

Not when you were standing where I was.

And nobody’s any different from anyone else, not when you come right down to it.

These are the kinds of things a guy thinks about when he visits his own grave.

I sat down next to my headstone and flopped back on the hard soil and grass. I plucked a single blade poking through the scattering of snow. At least it was coming in green. No dead, brown grass and lubbers now.

Thank the Sweet Redeemer, as Amma liked to say.

You’re welcome. That’s what I’d like to say.

I looked at the grave next to me and touched the fresh, cold soil with my hand, letting it fall through my fingers. Not a bit dry either. Things really had changed around Gatlin.

I was brought up a good Southern boy, and I knew better than to disturb or disrespect any grave in town. I had walked circles around graveyards, trailing my mom carefully to avoid accidentally putting a stray foot on someone’s sacred plot.

It was Link who didn’t know better than to lie on top of the graves and pretend to sleep where the dead were resting. He wanted to practice—that’s what he said. A dry run. “I want to see what the view is like from down there. You wouldn’t want a guy to head out for the rest a his life without knowin’ where it was all takin’ him in the end, would you?”

But when it came to graves, it was a different thing to worry about disrespecting your own.

That’s when a familiar voice caught in the wind, surprising me with how close it was. “You get used to it, you know.”

I followed the voice a few graves over, and there she was, red hair blowing wild. Genevieve Duchannes. Lena’s ancestor, the first Caster who had used The Book of Moons to try to bring back someone she loved—the original Ethan Wate. He was my great-great-great-great-uncle, and it hadn’t worked out any better for him than it had for me. Genevieve failed, and Lena’s family was cursed.

The last time I saw Genevieve, I was digging up her grave with Lena, looking for The Book of Moons.

“Is that—Genevieve? Ma’am?” I sat up.

She nodded, curling and uncurling a loose strand of hair with her hand. “I thought you might be coming around. I wasn’t sure when. There’s been a lot of talk.” She smiled. “Though your kind tends to stay in Perpetual Peace. Casters, we go where we like. Most of us stay in the Tunnels. I feel better here.”

Talk? I bet there was, though it was hard to imagine a town full of ghostly Sheers doing the talking. More like my Aunt Prue, probably.

Her smile faded. “But you’re just a boy. It’s worse, isn’t it? That you’re so young.”

I nodded in Genevieve’s direction. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, you’re here now, and that’s what matters. I suppose I owe you, Ethan Lawson Wate.”

“You don’t owe me anything, ma’am.”

“I hope to repay the debt one day. Returning my locket meant the world to me, but I don’t think you’ll see much gratitude from Ethan Carter Wate, wherever he may be. He always was a bit stubborn that way.”

“What happened to him? If you don’t mind my asking, ma’am.” I’d always wondered about Ethan Carter Wate—after he came back to life for only a second. I mean, he was the beginning of all of this, everything that had happened to Lena and me. The other end of the thread we pulled, the one that had unraveled the entire universe.

Didn’t I have a right to know how his story ended? It couldn’t have been much worse than mine, could it?

“I don’t really know. They took him away to the Far Keep. We couldn’t be together, but I’m sure you know that. I learned it myself, the hard way,” she said, her voice sad and far away.