A/N-First few quotes are direct from the novel, these quotes are italicized.


1950:

"Didn't there used to be a wood once, down the other side of town?"

"Sure," said the counterman. "Had a big electrical storm, though, about three years ago now or thereabouts. Big tree got hit by lightning, split right down the middle. Caught fire and everything, tore up the ground, too, had to bulldoze her all out."

"Oh," said Tuck. He and Mae exchanged glances.


1947:

Winifred Foster was old.

She was old and she was dying soon, she knew that.

She hadn't left her family's home, she moved back into it after she got married. Her grown granddaughter took care of her now, in the same bedroom she'd grown up in.

Suddenly, a large racket shook the house, and Holly-her granddaughter-appeared in the room.

"There's a huge storm, grandma. I know it's sort of late, but it's not like you could sleep through this anyways. Want to watch?" Winnie nodded.

She'd loved storms, loved them ever since the thunderstorm of 1880.

Holly helped her out of bed and into a chair by the window, where she watched the thunder and lightning-filled clouds scatter across the sky.

They reached the woods in front of her house, and struck.

It was Holly Jackson who called the fire company that night, leaving Winnie to sit at the window and watch the entire forest go up in flames.

The first thing she thought of was the Tuck family's home.

Would it survive the fire, it was not likely.

But it had probably fallen down, collapsed in, by now. The last time Winifred Foster had been able to locate the Tuck's old house was twenty years ago now, and even then Mae Tuck's old dresses were fraying and the wood of the home starting to show signs of termites.

The old thing was already done for, anyways.

But her second thought, was the spring.

The tree above the spring was always the tallest one in the forest, and that was the one that had been struck.

Winnie could not help it, she laughed hysterically.

Good, she thought, you deserve to die.

And her next thought, was of Jesse Tuck.

It was the first time she had allowed herself to think of him in forty years.

immediately, she took back what she said about the spring; for, if it had never existed, her and Jesse would never have met.

He must have known by now, must have realized, that she didn't drink from it. No, Winifred Foster would not make a good 'rock,' as Tuck called them.

They were trapped, the Tucks were, and she knew that as much as Jesse wanted her, he did not want her like this, like him.

So she entered a fit of hysterics, of delirium, watching the forest she'd loved as a child go up in flames.

And, in that moment, she wanted to die right along with it.

Because dying was easier, so much easier, than waiting for a man who would never come, a man you knew you would never have. For Winnie had changed, and Jesse never would.