SYNOPSIS:

Thea is eight, whip-smart, autistic, and increasingly invisible to the father she adores. Since her mother died, he has poured everything into building a gleaming new town at the edge of an old forest — and though he never stops saying “I love you” on his way out the door, he has stopped being there to mean it. The night the whole town loses power, the two of them finally snap at each other, and she runs into the trees, where she meets a boy sitting calmly among the frozen machines. He tells her, gently, that he used to be a tree. She has no way to prove it to anyone. She believes him anyway. What follows is a story about the cost of being believed. Her father, terrified he is losing his daughter to something he can’t see or explain, pulls them further apart at the exact moment the forest itself comes under threat from the town’s own expansion. A fire nearly takes everyone she loves at once — and in the middle of it, her father finally sees, with his own eyes, everything she had been trying to show him all along. Decades later, she is still keeping a promise to a boy who became a tree again: not waiting for him to come back, but waiting for the one night nature will finally let her say goodbye properly