It was not in his bed, but underneath it where Thomas would go to think about his story. He had created a space for himself there after Baby Sadie died. He went there when his mother retreated to her room and closed the curtains. Thomas called it UnderLand. His father didn’t like it when he tucked himself beneath the bed behind the sweater boxes since that made Thomas hard to find; but his father wasn’t always the boss of him.

After school the next day, Thomas got his mother’s wool coat from the closet and, pulling aside the boxes, spread the coat out like a blanket and pushed it up against the wall. He slid on top of it and pulled the boxes back into place before wrapping himself in a layer of wool. Closing his eyes, he lay still, thinking about his mother and the sad polar bear.

“I like this,” Dave said.

Thomas opened his eyes. His butterfly was talking. For some reason, he thought of Mrs. Evans’s explanation about the stomach being the second brain. Inside his stomach, Dave’s wings opened and closed as if approving of the thought.

His father was calling. “Come down, Thomas! You have a visitor.”

Scattering the boxes, Thomas slid out from under the bed. He ran downstairs feeling as if he’d been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to do.

“Thomas!” Giselle enveloped him in her big puffy jacket, pressing her cheek against his, her lips kissing the air. “Êtes-vous bien? Are you well?” She pushed him away to regard him at arm’s length. “That’s a silly question, isn’t it, bien sûr que non. Of course you’re not. I’ve brought you some chocolate madeleines. There’s a lady at the bakery who speaks French to me if there are no customers.”

“Why don’t you come in, Giselle?” Thomas’s father said.

“Merci, Monsieur Moran.”

“You can eat the cookies in the kitchen,” his father said, before returning to his office in the basement.

Thomas and Giselle went into the kitchen. Every surface was covered with unfamiliar packages: baskets of fruit they hadn’t purchased, tins of nuts, and Thomas knew that the freezer was filled with casserole dishes with masking tape labels in unfamiliar handwriting. Where had it all come from?

Giselle took off her jacket, sat down at the table, untied the box, and bit into a cookie. Using her pinkie to sweep the crumbs into her other hand, she said: “Go on. Tell me. You have a secret. I can tell by your posture. And the way you keep rubbing the side of your face.”

Thomas joined her at the table and nodded. It was the best secret he’d ever had.

My mother is warm!

She was protected inside the polar bear’s coat and boots. She could curl up and sleep on the snow if she needed to. Polar bears did that and they stayed snug and dry.

“If I tell you, it won’t be a secret,” Thomas said, tracing his finger along the edge of the table.

“Of course it will. That’s why people say they’ll let you in on the secret. It’s like inviting you into their fort. Once we’re inside together, we close the door. Then it’s our secret.”

While she was talking, Giselle placed her hand on Thomas’s. Did she know that Thomas had a fort? No. She couldn’t possibly know about UnderLand.

Her hand was so warm.

“My mother’s in a story,” he said. “Mrs. Sharp and I put her there last night.”

“You mean…like a fairy tale?” Giselle asked in a whisper, scooting her chair closer to Thomas. “A ‘Once upon a time…happily ever after’ fairy tale?”

“We only have ‘Once upon a time,’ ” he said. “So far. She met a polar bear.”

“A polar bear,” Giselle repeated.

Taking the cookie Giselle handed him, Thomas nibbled at it to please her. It tasted like sand. He didn’t know why, but everything he ate tasted like sand…or oatmeal. Watery oatmeal, the way his father made it. “Mrs. Sharp helped me begin,” he said. “The polar bear gave my mother a coat handed down from the very first polar bear queen. She had to get warm. First things first.”

“Thomas?” Giselle asked, squeezing his hand. “Can I play, too?”

Before Thomas could answer, she finished her cookie and said, “I just had an idea. I’ll be right back.”

And then all that occupied the kitchen besides himself and the fruit baskets and the tins of nuts was the sound of the front door slamming. He wondered if telling Giselle had been a good idea.

“Nope.” Dave weighed in, fluttering his wings for no reason at all.

When Giselle returned, she placed a fabric bag on the table with a clunk. Covered in lions—the kind that stood up on flags and coats of arms—the bag was lined with scarlet fabric and cinched tight with a gold cord. Thomas could tell this was not an ordinary bag.

Pushing the bag over to Thomas, Giselle extracted another cookie from the box. “Go on,” she said, biting into her madeleine. “Open it.”

Thomas worked at the knot until it loosened. He reached in and pulled out a shiny coin with a rooster on one side and a man with leaves in his hair on the other.

“They’re all different.” Reaching into the bag, Giselle sifted through the coins. “There’s one I especially like—here it is!” She handed Thomas a silver coin with the figure of a woman in a long dress, her face turned away. “It reminds me of your mother.”

Thomas brought the coin closer to his face. Even stamped onto silver, this woman seemed to have more energy than his mother. She was going somewhere, walking so quickly that her hair could not keep up.

“What are these?” he asked Giselle.

“Francs,” she replied. “They don’t use them in France anymore. They’ve used euros since 1999. My mom helps me collect them. But I want to donate them now. To the story. A sack of shiny gold and silver coins can come in very handy in a fairy tale.”

While Giselle talked, Thomas rolled a little bite of madeleine around in his mouth.

Did money exist in the astral plane? If it did, and his mother needed to pay for shelter for the night or a loaf of bread, these shiny coins seemed more useful than the credit cards she’d left behind.

“But how…how will we get them to her?” he asked Giselle.

“I don’t know. Maybe by making a wish.” Giselle’s hand hovered over the cookie box. “Thomas, you need to finish at least one cookie. They’re quite small, really.”