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  PRAISE FOR WHERE THE FOREST MEETS THE STARS

  “Vanderah’s beautifully human story reminds us that sometimes we need to look beyond the treetops at the stars to let some light into our lives.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “Enchanting, insightful, and extraordinary.”

  —Novelgossip

  “Where the Forest Meets the Stars is a magical little gem of a book filled with lots of love and hope.”

  —HelloGiggles

  “A captivating fantasy tale of mystery and intrigue . . .”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A skillfully written and thoroughly entertaining novel by an author with a genuine gift for originality and a distinctive narrative-driven storytelling style . . .”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Though the novel appears to start as a fantasy, it evolves into a domestic drama with murder-mystery elements, all adding up to a satisfying read.”

  —Booklist

  “Where the Forest Meets the Stars, by Glendy Vanderah, is an enchanting, heartwarming, not to be missed novel that is bursting with love and hope.”

  —The Patriot Ledger

  “A heartwarming, magical story about love, loss, and finding family where you least expect it. This touching novel will remind readers of a modern-day The Snow Child.”

  —Christopher Meades, award-winning author of Hanna Who Fell from the Sky

  “Where the Forest Meets the Stars is an enchanting novel full of hope and the power of love that will pull at your heartstrings. Perfect for fans of Sarah Addison Allen.”

  —Karen Katchur, author of Spring Girls

  “Where the Forest Meets the Stars will grab you from the very first page and surprise you the whole way through. This is an incredibly original, imaginative, and curious story. Glendy Vanderah has managed to create a world that is very real and, yet, entirely out of the ordinary.”

  —Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & the Six

  “In Where the Forest Meets the Stars, Glendy Vanderah weaves a deft and poignant story with well-drawn characters, including clever Ursa. With an unexpected and heart-racing climax, readers will wait breathlessly to find out what happens. A beautiful story of love, resilience, and the power of second chances.”

  —Susie Orman Schnall, award-winning author of We Came Here to Shine

  “Where the Forest Meets the Stars is a lovely, surprising, and insightful look at the way bonds are formed—both the ones that we choose and the ones that seem to choose us.”

  —Rebecca Kauffman, author of The Gunners

  “Where the Forest Meets the Stars is an enchanting novel . . . Readers will be taken by Glendy Vanderah’s rich and relatable characters and the way in which she weaves their stories together. At its core, Where the Forest Meets the Stars is about having faith, nurturing hope, and trusting your heart above your head, because when you do, miracles are possible.”

  —Janis Thomas, bestselling author of What Remains True

  “A powerful story of the way in which hearts are mended by love, compassion, and everyday miracles. Cleverly plotted and building to an intense crescendo in the final chapters, Where the Forest Meets the Stars is a beautiful and unforgettable debut.”

  —Julianne MacLean, USA Today bestselling author

  ALSO BY GLENDY VANDERAH

  Where the Forest Meets the Stars

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Glendy C. Vanderah

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542028103 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542028108 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542026208 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542026202 (paperback)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  First Edition

  For my family

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE DAUGHTER OF THE WILD WOOD

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART TWO DAUGHTER OF RAVEN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART THREE DAUGHTER OF THE WILD WOOD

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  PART FOUR DAUGHTER OF RAVEN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART FIVE DAUGHTER OF THE MIRACULOUS UNIVERSE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Prologue

  The first words Ellis wrote to the woods were Please come back. She was nine years old, sitting on the bank of the river in the Wild Wood. Zane had named it that. When she came home with muddy shoes and wind-tangled hair, he’d say something like, “Has the hobgoblin been to her Wild Wood again?” And she’d reply, “Yes,” because it was wild and it was hers.

  No one but Ellis went in the forest that bordered the trailer park and stretched far beyond the other side of the river. Other people thought that bit of water and trees was just a lot of nothing. They couldn’t see how pretty it was. To get in from the trailer park, they would have to know how to crawl through a thicket of rose and blackberry thorns. Ellis knew the exact spot. It was like a magic door.

  The day she wrote the first note, she’d gone straight in from the school bus. She’d done that most days for the last few months since her mother had gotten worse. She liked to sit by the river to do her homework, but that day the math problems sat unsolved in her lap. All she wanted to do was watch the river.

  The water was high from spring rains, all kinds of stuff floating past fast. Leaves, branches, a paper cup. A ghostly white cloth that might be a T-shirt slithered over a riffle of rocks. It caught on a submerged branch for a while, but the river worked at it, pulling and fretting, until the cloth jerked away from the branch. Ellis sat up to see if it would get caught again. But the ghost shirt disappeared, sucked by swirling currents into the deep black water. For some reason, she felt as if her insides had sunk down with it.

  She ripped a little square from her notebook paper and wrote the three words. Please come back. She stared at them for a long time, then added two more. From Ellis.

  She folded the paper in half and tossed it into the river. She watched the little boat glide swiftly away on the gray glass of water. She imagined her words as five staunch sailors who would endure the hazards of rough water to deliver her message. She watched those words until they disappeared around the river bend.

  Sending the
message felt satisfying. As if something important had transpired between her and the river.

  When her note hadn’t brought results a few days later, she decided to be more specific. That blustery April day, she wrote in careful script, Dear Wind, Please bring Zane back. From Ellis. She scaled her climbing tree to the usual high branch, waited for a strong gust of wind, and let the tiny letter go. It flew out of sight much faster than the first message. She hoped that was a good sign.

  It wasn’t, not for bringing Zane back, but she kept writing to the woods anyway. She sent more words downriver and into the wind, tucked tiny messages into tree roots, laid them under rocks, sank them into the soft punk of rotting logs.

  She didn’t know why she kept doing it. It just felt good, maybe how some kids felt when they talked to God in their prayers. After a while, you figured out no one was going to answer. That made it better, really, because you could say any secret thing you wouldn’t say to someone who was listening. That was all that mattered, getting some of the words out before they piled too full inside you.

  PART ONE

  DAUGHTER OF THE WILD WOOD

  1

  Ellis saw a dark hollow at the base of an oak. It would be a good place to put a message.

  What would she write? How would she word what she’d seen when she still couldn’t comprehend it?

  She tried to imagine how her nine-year-old self would say it. Concisely, on a small shred of paper: Dear Tree, Jonah has betrayed me. I don’t know what to do. From Ellis.

  What she wanted to write was, What should I do? But other than the day she’d asked the wind to bring Zane back, she usually didn’t ask for something directly. Writing the notes had mostly been a way to work through events that troubled her. She did it for years, the messages increasing in length as she got older.

  Dear Rock, I wonder where Zane is and if he misses me.

  Dear Tree, Mom won’t get up and I have no food. Maybe I should ask Edith for supper.

  Dear Salamander, Today Heather told me I should wash my clothes. She said it in front of everyone on the bus. I wish I lived under this log with you. You get to be as dirty as you want.

  Jasper and River had run ahead. They were almost at the little pier that jutted over the forest pond.

  Ellis had to pull her mind back to where she was.

  “Careful!” she called. “Don’t get too close to the water.” The boys were four and a half and had been taught how to stay afloat in swim lessons, but she still feared their nearness to the deep black water.

  When she arrived at the dock, they were stretched out on their bellies, fishnets in hand, looking for tadpoles. The muscles in her arms and shoulders released their aching tension as she set down the baby in her car carrier. She gave the boys the two mason jars from the bag in her other hand.

  “Shore will be a better place to find them,” she said.

  She showed her sons where to find tadpoles, in the muck along the shoreline. In his knee-high rubber boots, River stepped into the water to block Jasper. He wanted to be the first to capture one.

  Jonah and Ellis secretly joked that the twins had taken their names too literally: River as loud and impetuous as rushing water, Jasper as quiet and forbearing as a stone. River was born three minutes before his twin, and he’d been three steps ahead of Jasper ever since.

  Thinking about Jonah made her physically ill. She sat on the ground next to the baby.

  She had to divorce him. Obviously.

  He’d probably been with Irene since early in Ellis’s pregnancy. That was when he’d started the lessons. All those months, he’d been sleeping with his hard-bodied tennis instructor while his wife got softer growing his baby. She suspected he’d been lying to her about that tough case at his law firm. Lying to his boys. On Saturday, he wouldn’t even take them to the park. He’d probably been with Irene.

  Ellis kept seeing it, Jonah getting into her sporty white car near his work. The passionate kiss. At eleven thirty in the morning. Tennis wasn’t the only reason he’d gotten in shape lately. Apparently, he was doing intense workouts over his long lunch hours.

  The boys had been in the van when Ellis saw the kiss. If she hadn’t quickly said something to distract them, they might have seen. Any of her friends might have. Probably some of their mutual friends had seen them together or knew about the affair. Ellis felt betrayed by them, too.

  “I found a whole bunch!” River said. “Mom! Come see!”

  She glanced at Viola asleep in her carrier. She’d nodded off during the jostling walk through the woods. Ellis left her at the pier to look at the tadpoles.

  “Do you see them?” River said. “Mom? Mom?”

  “I see.”

  “You’re stepping on them,” Jasper said. “River, stop it!”

  “I’m not! They swam away.”

  “Mom, he’s killing them.”

  “Guys, let’s just calm down, okay? Put some pond water in your jars and try to catch a few.”

  “How many?” Jasper asked.

  “You can each catch about ten. Twenty’s a good number for the big fishbowl, don’t you think?”

  “I want to keep mine in a different place from Jasper’s,” River said.

  “No, they all go in the bowl. And once they turn into frogs, we’ll bring them back here.”

  “Why?”

  “This is their home. They’re adapted to this environment.”

  How would the boys adapt to the new life ahead of them? Now they’d be living between two parents and two homes. Would she keep the house or would Jonah? Would she have to get a job? What kind of job would an undergraduate degree in plant biology get her—especially when she had zero experience in anything but babies?

  She returned to her daughter and tucked the blanket beneath her cherubic face. Even through Viola’s baby fat, Ellis could see she was going to look like her. She had the brown eyes and tan olive complexion, and she already had a lot of curl to her dark hair. Her daughter would be the first relative she knew who looked like her. The boys took after Jonah and her mother, both with fairer skin, blue eyes, and straight hair. Ellis assumed she and Viola must look like her father, but she knew nothing about him other than a name on her birth certificate. But she even questioned that because her mother said, “I don’t know who your father was,” the one time she’d responded to Ellis’s questions about him.

  She dabbed a dribble of breast milk on the side of the baby’s lips with her finger. Viola reacted to her touch, turning her mouth instinctively toward it, but stayed asleep.

  Even now, more than two months postpartum, Ellis sometimes couldn’t believe Viola was there, another being she’d created, another little person who depended on her. Just when she’d finally gotten used to her routine with Jonah and the boys, when she’d almost come to terms with the strange future the unplanned twins had thrust upon her and Jonah. Thrown from campus life into suburbia. Botany texts traded for parenting books. Singles’ parties replaced by playgroups. Graduate school applications buried beneath research into preschools.

  Ellis suspected the sudden reality of another baby had been as much of a shock to Jonah. Maybe that was why he’d escaped into the affair with Irene. Yet, he’d been the one who pushed for another baby. As the boys approached four, when they looked more “little boy” than toddler, Jonah had said he wanted a baby in the house again. He missed the infant stage, hoped for a girl.

  And here was his little girl, left mostly to Ellis—an exhausted, milk-dripping matron, also juggling two active boys, while Jonah got to act his twenty-nine years, talking to adults at work, going out for drinks, feeling attractive with a beautiful young woman.

  “Stop it!” River said. “Mom!”

  Tadpole catching was not going well. None of it was. Ellis had come to the woods to calm herself, but she felt worse than when she’d arrived and still been in shock. Now she was angry.

  And she felt guilty, she realized, because that inkling she’d had from the start, that she and J
onah weren’t meant to be, must have been real. Even months after they’d been together, she’d sensed an absence of passion in him, though he frequently proclaimed his love for her. She’d mistrusted her doubts, assuming the deficiency—if there was one—had to do with her. She had plenty of proof that she was to blame. Her mother hadn’t wanted her. Zane had left her, hadn’t even said goodbye. Ellis wasn’t like regular people. She was unsociable and peculiar, not the kind of person anyone wanted to stick with.

  She had to get out of the forest. For the first time in her life, her favorite environment felt all wrong, as if it had also betrayed her. The trees and rocks, the dark water, whispered about her, telling the story of the needy little girl who’d written notes to no one.

  She hastened the tadpole catching. The boys complained about her helping, but at the rate they were going—Jasper with two tadpoles in his jar, River with four—they would be there for hours. Ellis scooped tadpoles into the net she’d taken from Jasper and dumped them into their jars. When she tried to get them moving, River complained that Jasper had more in his jar.

  “It doesn’t matter. They’re all going into one tank,” she said.

  “It’s not fair,” River said.

  She dropped another net of the wriggling creatures into River’s jar, increasing his catch by at least half a dozen. He shot Jasper a triumphant grin.

  “Mom . . . ,” Jasper began.

  “Enough,” she said, screwing the lids onto the mason jars.

  Viola was still asleep. Ellis wrapped her arm around the carrier handle, picked up the bag with nets, and headed down the trail. Every step closer to the van was like heading for a cliff edge. When Jonah got home, she’d tell him what she’d decided. She had to step off the precipice, end this charade they were calling a marriage.

  No, she wasn’t ending it. Jonah already had. She had to be firm with herself about that.

  A raven called its guttural croak from the direction of the trailhead parking lot. Something had it riled up, maybe a hawk near its nest. As Ellis arrived in the parking lot, she saw the raven. It was perched on a branch over her van, calling with strange urgency, voicing the wretchedness of her situation. She wished it would shut up.