Time is like a wheel. Turning and turning - never stopping. And the woods are the center; the hub of the wheel. It began the first week of summer, a strange and breathless time when accident, or fate, bring lives together. When people are led to do things, they've never done before. On this summer's day, not so very long ago, the wheel set lives in motion in mysterious ways. It set Mae Tuck out in her wagon for the village of Tree Gap to meet her two sons as she did once every ten years.

Winnie Foster was to be sent 500 miles away to be educated, but what her parents didn't understand was that she only wanted to step outside her fence... so she did. What in these quiet woods should be so forbidden? Winnie had always sensed a mystery waiting for her there.

For some time passes slowly, an hour can seem an eternity. For others, there's never enough. For Jesse Tuck, it didn't exist.

Winnie Foster was beginning to lose track of time. Had she been there a day? A week? A month? It seemed to Winnie that the Tucks lived in a way the rest of the world had forgotten. They where never in a hurry and did things the slow way. For the first time Winnie felt free to explore, to ask questions, to play.

Tuck said it to Winnie the summer she turned 15: Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don't have to live forever. You just have to live. And she did.

I'm going to see the whole world, every speck of it. Heck, I may even find some new continents or something!

Spend forever with me, Winnie?

I'm gonna be 17 until the end of the world!

How am I supposed to take you home when I can't make my feet move from this spot? If I could die tomorrow I would, just so I could spend one more night with you.

Winnie Foster, I will love you, until the day I die.