Page 17 of Finders Keepers

It is magical. Not literally, obviously.

But I can’t deny that there’s this sense here that anything might be possible.

Even when the Castle had broken windows, flaking paint, and a partially caved-in roof, it still exuded this quiet yet enticing playfulness.

I suppose that’s why Fountain loved living here so much.

And why it’s always felt like such a touchstone for Quentin (and, I guess, for me) as we went about the rest of our lives.

Maybe all of my overwhelming feelings back then weren’t even about Quentin at all. They were just grief over the end of my love affair with this fascinating place.

Even more reason to put the past behind us and finish what we started so we can move on without the risk of becoming enchanted again.

“So,” I say, still feeling the need to explain myself. It’s part of our agreement, after all. The word comes out croaky, so I clear my throat, then point down the path. “That night. When you were at the cenotaph. I, um, went inside the house.”

Quentin’s eyes go wide in disbelief. “You…Jesus, Nina. That was stupid.”

“Excuse me?”

“What if you’d gotten hurt? The place was falling apart and—”

“I was careful,” I argue. He shakes his head in exasperation.

My left knee twinges, thanks to the long walk and many stairs it took to get here.

I sit down on a small bench tucked among the rosebushes that make up the southwestern edge of the formal gardens, hugging one of the mansion’s rough-hewn stone walls.

The fragrance drifts through the air and a pink petal falls at my feet as if saying hello. “I didn’t find anything. Obviously.”

“Okay. And…?” he responds, as if still waiting for more.

“And what?”

“I always wondered, why did you decide to search there instead of meeting me?”

“You didn’t have to wonder. Nothing was stopping you from asking.” I immediately kick myself for the waspish tone of my voice.

He responds steadily, “I’m asking now.”

My eyes wander back toward the cenotaph, over the gentle crest of a hill.

If I’d met Quentin there as we’d agreed, would we still have gotten caught?

Would he have still declared it all—our friendship, the time we spent together—a mistake?

Everything that happened that night may very well have been all my fault.

Guilt feels like a pile of worms wriggling inside the pit of my stomach.

Quentin leans casually against a portion of the Castle’s wall not guarded by the rosebushes, examining his thumb as he bends and straightens it a few times, as if my answer to his question isn’t that important, really.

As if he hasn’t actually been waiting for me to give him this information for nearly two decades.

Then again, maybe his “I always wondered” was less like “I frequently lie awake at night pondering why you did what you did” and more the kind of idle curiosity that accompanies that thing you want to look up on Wikipedia but can never seem to remember at a convenient time.

Clean slate , I remind myself. Clean slate .

These thoughts are the opposite of that.

In fact, my slate has all of the ghostlike chalk impressions of the past, smeared all around to make the black surface more of a smoke color.

I take a deep breath and close my eyes to recalibrate—what I hope will be the mental equivalent of taking a wet paper towel to the whole thing and trying again.

As I breathe in through my nose, the faint rose smell becomes thicker.

My eyes open again to find Quentin crouched in front of me, his face inches from mine.

He slides a large, fluffy pink rose into my hair, above my left ear.

His fingertips brush against my cheek as he lowers his hand again, and it takes all of my strength not to lean into the touch.

“I hope that doesn’t have any bugs hiding in it,” I say, my words coming out a little breathless.

“I shook it out first.”

Even so, I slip it from my own hair and tuck it into his, which has just enough length and body to hold it.

“It looks better on you,” I say. He smiles slowly and lets out a little hum of satisfaction that I don’t remember ever hearing before but decide deserves a place in the catalog of his laughs, forever filed under this moment: him looking unfairly delicious, smelling of soap and flowers and the light musk of exertion, staring back at me with a confidence that’s entirely proprietary to this grown-up version of him.

“So are you going to tell me why you thought it could be there?” he asks.

Oh. Right. Focus, Nina. No, no, not on his lips. On words.

I swallow before continuing. “We thought we might find Cetus among the constellations on the cenotaph. But I’d also seen another collection of stars in one of the rooms inside the Castle.

” Glancing back at the external wall of the mansion, I fold my hands in my lap and speed through the rest of my words when I land on the right ones.

“I came here one day without you…sometime at the end of July, I think. You were at your grandparents’ for the week, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to poke around a bit.

See what I could find. It had stormed pretty bad overnight, and the wind forced a side door ajar just enough for me to slip through.

I knew it was illegal, and probably not even safe, but…

I couldn’t pass up that kind of opportunity, could I?

To see what it was like inside Fountain’s Castle? ”

I can’t say what gave me the courage to be so uncharacteristically bold, so brave. But it felt like something I had to do. For Quentin. For us .

That deep line in his forehead reappears. “You never told me that you came out here by yourself.”

I flap my hands and say, “Clean slate.” I’m grateful that seems to work as a get-out-of-jail-free card, Quentin simply rolling his eyes.

“I only did a quick walk-through, since I was pretty anxious about getting caught or running into a ghost. But one of the rooms upstairs had this…I don’t know if it was wallpaper or painted directly on the plaster, but the walls were covered in stars.

Really faded and dirty, but they were definitely stars.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but then you told me about Cetus when we were in your backyard and my very first thought was that room.

How the stars hadn’t been positioned willy-nilly, but like, arranged in specific patterns.

Constellations. I was going to go along with your plan to check the cenotaph again, because there are a lot of stars on the back of it, and you could’ve been right. ”

“But you didn’t,” he says flatly. “Go along with it.”

“No. I didn’t.”

He simply waves this away, as if this recounting of my betrayal is a minor flub that can be edited out later. Quentin is way better at the clean slate thing than I am, it seems. Unsurprising, considering how good he is at forgetting things. And people.

“So. You thought you’d find it in that room. That you’d cracked it,” Quentin says, staring off into the distance, looking deep in thought.

“Yeah,” I admit. “I thought I had.”

He blinks a few times before looking at me again.

His lips curve into a small smile. “That’s really brilliant, Neen.

Amazing work.” There isn’t any sarcasm in the statement.

Just the same admiring tone I heard him use when we were kids and I managed to best him at something.

That’s what made competing with Quentin so addicting, come to think of it.

Don’t get me wrong—the boy loved to win.

But he also never seemed to mind too much when he didn’t.

In fact, he often looked…proud of me. The way he’s looking at me right now.

And I know deep down that’s why I tried to find the treasure on my own.

Because I thought he would be so impressed that that pride would transform into something else.

Something that might survive the upcoming distance between us.

Not love, maybe, because when he didn’t kiss me that night in his backyard I figured he must not return my feelings.

But I still thought that his admiration, his respect for my mind (and the hustle) might leave a lasting impression.

That it would only strengthen what we had.

Then again, I’m realizing that maybe what we had wasn’t as strong as I believed it was. Maybe the outcome wouldn’t have changed, regardless of what I did or didn’t do that night.

“I was wrong, though,” I say. “The treasure wasn’t there.”

“Are we sure about that?” he asks after a short pause.

“All I found was the skeleton of some small, unfortunate animal beneath a newspaper, and an empty Bubble Tape container.”

“No chance you missed something?”

“I mean…I was as thorough as I could be, but it was dark and the walls were too damaged for me to figure out if Cetus was actually there. I didn’t get to check every single floorboard or anything.

Honestly, after finding the skeleton I was a bit less enthusiastic in my search.

And then…you know…” I wiggle my finger in the air and say, “Wee-woo, wee-woo.”

He lets out a responding laugh that I recognize as the earliest entry in the catalog.

It’s the same one from the very first conversation we ever had, in front of our houses while the movers were lugging the last few boxes into 304 and one full of his sister’s underwear dropped and split open on the sidewalk.

I still find it tucked inside a subfolder labeled Reluctant favorites .

“I don’t think the treasure was inside that room,” I reiterate. “I’m like ninety percent certain it wasn’t. Don’t patronize me by telling me it was smart for me to look there.”

“Okay, fine. You were wrong to look there and it was a stupid thing to do. And also you suck.”

“Thank you,” I say, feeling somewhat relieved to have that over with, even if he is being facetious.

“But also maybe you were onto something. That summer, almost all of our search focused on the property.”

“Yeah, because we didn’t have access to the house.” I’m aware of the irony that I am the one saying this, so I add, “Technically.”

“Right. But that’s a pretty massive oversight, don’t you think? He could have hidden it inside the house.”

It’s true that, aside from my solo search in July and that last night, we almost solely focused on the gardens and outbuildings.

Probably because it was a lot more fun as teens to wander around, tapping on various stones and covertly digging small holes, than to try to reconstruct the Castle’s original interior based on old photos.

That, and we hadn’t exactly planned to trespass at the beginning, especially not into a spooky-ass mansion.

“Hmm.” I stand and start following the brick pathway through the gardens. Quentin follows close behind me; I can tell because he’s started whistling idly, the way he did my first day back in town when he made his way from the porch to his car.

I turn abruptly as we reach the ornate asymmetrical front of Fountain’s mansion. “Is that even a real song?” I ask.

He doesn’t respond, only quirks the corner of his mouth.

“If you’re just going to try to get on my nerves all summer, we don’t have to do this at all,” I threaten.

Quentin tucks his hands into his pockets and takes a step closer, tilting his head down.

His mouth is only inches from my ear, and when he speaks, the heat of his breath sweeps against the sensitive skin there.

“I’m not trying to get on your nerves, Nina.

” His voice is quiet, intimate. The way it might be if we were in a crowded room and he wanted to ensure his words were for my ears only. “I’m succeeding.”

“Okay, that’s it,” I declare, turning on my heel again.

Sure, I’m only confirming his assertion, but I can’t stand here and convincingly insist he isn’t getting under my skin.

Because I’ve rarely been more annoyed. Not just with him, but with the hot pressure curled in my stomach like a cobra, unsure whether to take a nap or strike.

There’s no way I can handle an entire eight weeks of spending time with this man. He is…frustrating. Very frustrating.

“Neen, wait,” he says, lunging forward. His hand grabs mine and gently pulls until I’m back at the base of the stairs leading up to the Castle’s entryway. “I’ll be good. I promise.”

I narrow my eyes. I find that doubtful, especially because his own eyes are once again crinkled in the corners in the stupidly handsome way that means he’s finding this very funny.

I’m about to tell him so—that I doubt he’ll be good, not the stupidly handsome part—when one side of the front doors creaks open, revealing a small, plump, middle-aged white woman.

“Oh, hello!” she calls to us. “You’re just in time! We’re about to start our two o’clock tour.”

Shall we? Quentin asks with his eyebrows and a quirk of his lips.

As tempted as I am to be contrary for the sake of it, I am much more intensely curious about the interior of Sprangbur Castle now that it’s been restored. And if we might be able to get a good look at that parlor with the stars. “Fine,” I grumble, and follow him inside.