Maybe she hated being out of control, knowing that someone or something else was dictating her fate. Because it’s really not fair. A drunk driver runs a red light, and you end up dead. A guy in a movie theater coughs on you, and you catch some rare, fatal disease. You sit in class minding your own business, and there’s the kid from sixth period holding a gun in his hand. Why should other people be in control? Why should someone else get to choose when you die?

Growth comes from questioning our own hearts. But unrelenting self-doubt can lead you astray.

I felt very alone. I lived in a world with practical people, like Emily and Rush and my parents, people who had stopped believing in the impossible a long time ago. Where were the other people like me? Locked up probably. Getting called crazy and delusional.

As long as something was a mystery, there was still the potential for amazement. Maybe that’s where I went wrong before. Some riddles weren’t meant to be solved.

That all depends on the person. What’s simple to one person might be inherently challenging to someone else.

And if Lizzie Lovett couldn’t find a reason why life was worth living, what hope did the rest of us have? What hope did I have.

It was unfair that you had to decide how to spend your life before you’d been out in the world and seen what the options were.

The woods had swallowed Lizzie’s secrets. She had lived, and she had died, and now, there was no trace of her. Elizabeth Lovett was just a name in a newspaper article, a statistic, someone people used to know.

These notes are little pieces of history no one cares about, but they remind you that you’re not the first person to hold that book. Someone else owned it first and read the exact same words, and one way or another, it impacted them. We’re all connected.

Pretty soon, it would be like Lizzie had never been a real person at all. If Enzo were there, I could have told him it scared me how Lizzie was already becoming irrelevant. He would have understood or maybe he would have made everything more complicated.