Hours stretched into an eternity since Alice and I had stumbled back from the woods. The silence in my room pressed down on me, thick and suffocating. Not a single word had escaped my lips. My gaze drifted to the familiar oak tree visible through the open window, its branches gnarled like arthritic fingers against the twilight sky. "I wish I could see Rex," the thought echoed in the hollow chambers of my heart. The image of his kind eyes, the comforting weight of his hand on my shoulder, felt like a distant dream.

The angry words I'd hurled at Alice in the woods hung in the air between us,...