There’s hope at the bottom of the biggest waterfall.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

You were merely wishing for the end of pain, the monster said. Your own pain. An end to how it isolated you. It is the most human wish of all.

People see stories everywhere,” Regine says. “That’s what my father used to say. We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn’t true.” She glances back at Seth. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.

The great trick of the devil is to make you want to see him. But it is only when you see him that you fear him. And by then, it is too late.

We stay watching the fire, which probably is just a fire, but we watch it together. Me and my friends. And there’ll be a tomorrow, of course there will, when it all begins again, but right now is almost a kind of loop for me, something to feel on the inside of, but this time it’s good. It’s a loop with my friends that would even be a pretty damn good forever.

Mel lets us in the house, and we aren’t two steps inside before Mary Magdalene, our tubby little orange cat, is running a purring streak around Jared’s legs. He touches her nose lightly with his finger. “I see you,” he whispers, and Mary Mags does an ecstatic lopsided spin to the floor, like a falling propeller.

Because even the one you hate leaves an absence when they go.

This is why I came walking, to tell you this so that you may heal. You must listen. Conor swallowed again. “I’m listening.” You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do. There.

A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.