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Stone hands it off to Wyatt who takes his turn searching. Lucas is next, each of them handling it like it’s a newborn. When we finish, we all sit back, staring at the item in varying degrees of apprehension and excitement. I bite my lip and have to tell myself to stop before I draw blood. I’m teeming with questions, with exhilaration that I need to pull back the reins on. Really, we’re not even sure if Stone’s theory about the three letters is actually correct, though his idea makes the most sense out of any I’ve heard.
“In the stream…” Stone starts, bewildered. “Is it even possible that the lantern we’re looking for is there?”
I spy the trickling water in the distance. We’re certainly within the area of the map we’ve designated as the place of interest.
“Streams change course over time,” Wyatt offers. “A hundred years or more ago, it might not have been in the water.”
I hold my head in my hands and start to rock. I know the treasure is real because I had the ring. But to think that the map my family has had all this time is actually usable? I can barely wrap my head around it.
I want so badly for this to be the right lantern which is why I’m keeping my mouth shut. I don’t want to jump to conclusions. I don’t want to be one ofthosetreasure hunters that automatically takes a piece of possible evidence and runs with it, declaring that they now know where the treasure is without authenticating anything.
“It would explain why no one in your family had found it yet.” Lucas presses his lips together in thought. “I kept thinking maybe it was under a fallen rock, but the water works, too. What if it was there all this time, hidden in the creek bed?”
Wyatt reaches over to rub my back. “Are you okay, Tits? You’re not saying anything and you’re starting to scare me.”
The three of them peer at me. My mouth is so dry that it takes several tries to lubricate it enough to talk. “I’m...processing,” I murmur.
“We have to get a professional to clean it,” Stone dictates, ever the one moving us forward. He eyes the lantern like a puzzle. “That’s the only way we’ll know for sure.”
“And even then,” Wyatt continues, “the water could’ve eroded the letters away.”
I want to add thateven then, we’re only operating on the assumption that Stone’s theory about the letters is correct. My stomach squeezes and nausea rolls over me. “If this is what we’ve been trying to find, we better be able to figure it out.”
Stone gets up, runs to his pack, and brings out the maps. He returns and lays them out on the rocky, desert floor, then places small rocks on the corners so the wind doesn’t whip it up. “If this is it…” Stone starts eyes widening. He stops himself a second later and breathes through his nose. He eyes us each in turn. “And I’m not saying it is… I want to do research first, butifit is—”
I point at the valley between two cliff faces. “That’s where we go next. It’s exactly as the map is drawn. It’s why we were looking here.”
Stone nods. “It would be up there.”
The four of us turn to stare into the shadow-filled valley. It’s pitch-black, the two cliffs blocking all the light from the moon.
Wyatt rubs my back again. “I thought you would cry from joy if we ever found this. I didn’t expect complete silence.”
“We don’t know if it isthat,” I counter right away.
“I know,” he acknowledges. “It’s a lantern from the same time period, though. Right in front of us… It’s even intact for the most part. We haven’t found anything like this before. Ever,” he reinforces.
My swirling thoughts rise up like a tidal wave. I bite the knuckle of my thumb to keep it all down because there is one tragic note lifting above the others: I want my dad to be here.
How fucking fucked up is that? He’s not even my dad.
But, in a way, he kind of was, wasn’t he? You don’t have to be blood related to be family. Taking the fact that he stole me from my real family out of the equation, he’s the only family I’ve ever known. I never had a reason to think otherwise.
He told me it was okay for me to find it. He told me I deserved to.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Wyatt whispers. He gets in my face and makes me look at him. “I don’t care what it is that you’re feeling, it’s right. You hear me?”
I shake my head. Wyatt would be the first to tell me that my father was a lying sack of shit, or worse. He hates him.
And for fuck’s sake, when will I stop thinking about him as my father?
A weaning cry escapes my lips. I shove my palm over my mouth to stifle it, but Wyatt takes my hand away and holds it, pressing his fingers into me. Stone and Lucas crowd in, too—the lantern temporarily forgotten. I feel dumb for garnering so much attention, but I just can’t with the emotions barreling through me right now.
Lucas scoots behind me, moving his legs around my hips, and makes me lie back on him. He cocoons me in his warmth as Wyatt and Stone stay on either side of me.
Right now, I understand why Wyatt got drunk and went to the jail where his mother is a prisoner. I get why he wanted to be so close to her while also probably hating her guts at the same time. Feelings are fucking tricky. They don’t always make sense. It’s easy for me to tell Wyatt his mother is a piece-of-shit excuse of a human being for killing his father and not caring if Wyatt got in the way of the process. Just like Wyatt can tell me until he’s blue in the face that my father was a fucked-up man. I get it...logically. But fuck, feelings aren’t sensible, they justare.
“I need a drink,” I mumble.