She turned her back on it, felt as hollow as the tree and wished she could recall why it had meant so much to her. For one fleeting moment it had seemed like the only thing in the world to her, a savior. I was out of my mind, she thought. In shock. The breeze grew stronger. She stopped. All around her flecks of cotton rose from the field like fireflies, caught in the beam of her flashlight as it carved a channel in the dark. Her hair fluttered around her face, her senses filled with the smell of earth and smoke, and without knowing why, she smiled as the million specks of cotton rose ever upward like souls released to the Heavens to join the stars. It was over in a moment, and to anyone else, it might have seemed a perfectly ordinary thing, something visible on any day of the week. But to Claire, the significance she'd sought from the tree was there in the cotton, and with it, came the answer to the riddle of what she'd thought she'd seen in the field that day. There is something else, she thought.
