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By the time he pulled up in front of the detached garage, he’d convinced himself that a foundation of lies was no foundation at all.

The real problem now was deciding on the right time to tell her.

Well, they’d eat first, and then he’d see how things went.

At least he could tell her that he’d posted flyers at the library and City Hall — and at the artist’s co-op across the street, since he’d gone over there once he was done with his research in the archives department.

It was a fun place with all kinds of art, from local pottery to watercolors of the forest and surrounding areas to some whimsical silver jewelry made by the woman who was minding the co-op when he came in.

In fact, he liked one small painting of a grove of birch trees so much that he bought it, figuring he could take it home and hang it in his rented house in Yucaipa to remind himself of his time in Silver Hollow.

“Pizza,” he said after he’d rung the doorbell and Sidney had opened the door.

“Right on time,” she responded, sounding approving.

Well, there might have been absent-minded professors out there in the world, but Ben knew he wasn’t one of them. His mother had been too much of a stickler about punctuality for him to ever be late unless there was a ten-car pileup on the freeway or something.

He kind of doubted that sort of thing happened very often around here.

“I do my best,” he said with a smile.

Sidney’s gray eyes twinkled a bit. “Good to know. The table’s set, so we can go ahead and get started.”

Ben followed her into the dining room, where everything was already set out and waiting for them, including a bottle of wine. Not chianti, but he figured a red blend was pretty universal.

After he’d set down the pizza box and she’d poured some wine for both of them, he said, “I got the flyers posted. Any reaction so far?”

Sidney’s nose wrinkled. “Oh, yeah. I put up a flyer in the pet shop and then handed the rest out to other businesses on the street. Everyone seemed interested and supportive…until Mayor Tillman showed up in my store this afternoon.”

“Oops,” Ben responded, and she only shrugged.

“No big deal,” she said. “Sure, he tried to guilt me about how Northwest Pacific was bringing jobs and money to the town, but I told him it sounded to me as if their own loggers were going to be doing the work, so I didn’t know if he should really be talking to me about jobs.

Then he got blustery — you know, the way some guys do when someone won’t roll over for them — and said I didn’t know what was best for Silver Hollow and that I needed to dial down the activism a bit.

I just looked him in the eye and informed him that free speech is protected in this country, and if he didn’t like what I was saying, he was free to go elsewhere. ”

Ben listened to all this with a sense of increasing respect. Yes, he’d already seen that Sidney was a pretty tough woman…she would have to be, after everything that had happened to her…but it was still something to hear how she’d faced down the mayor without batting an eye.

No wonder she’d come home and done what needed to be done. Maybe she’d wept in private over the disappearance of her mother and grandmother, but he doubted she’d shown that more vulnerable face to the public.

“And did he?”

Sidney had just taken a large bite of pizza — maybe to fortify herself after delivering that speech — so she had to wait to finish chewing before she could reply.

“Did he what?”

“Go elsewhere,” Ben replied, knowing he was probably grinning a bit too broadly.

She smiled in return, then swallowed some wine to wash down the pizza.

“Oh, yeah. He mumbled something about a meeting he had to get to, but I knew he was just using that as an excuse because he couldn’t think of how to respond.

So, I think it’s fine. In the end, it’s what the people of the town want, not what Mayor Tillman wants. ”

And thank God for that. Ben understood that the loggers were just men who were trying to earn a living, same as everyone else, but still, they could go do that somewhere else, in a remote area where the natural beauty people enjoyed every day wouldn’t be ruined.

“What happens next?” he asked before picking up his neglected slice of pizza so he could take a bite.

“Oh, I suppose there’ll be another town meeting.

I already heard Eliza saying that she wasn’t happy about the mayor’s announcement but didn’t know what to do.

I suggested putting a petition together, something we could take to show Tillman and the people on the city council that a majority of the residents here don’t want Northwest Pacific messing around in the forest. I don’t know what kind of contracts have been signed or exactly what’s been going on behind the scenes, but we’ll figure out some way to put a stop to all this. ”

Clearly, once Sidney was set in motion, she was a real force of nature. Ben wondered if all this would have happened without his intervention, and guessed it probably would, if not precisely on the same timeline.

“It’s a good thing that your town charter allows the citizens to have such a say in things,” he commented. “I’ve been plenty of places where the local politicians have pretty much ignored what the people want or need.”

She nodded, now looking much more serious. “I’ve thought that more than once myself. I guess it’s a good thing we found all this out before Northwest Pacific started cutting. Sometimes it’s a lot harder to stop things once they’ve been set in motion.”

That was for sure. Luckily, this kind of operation was the sort of thing that didn’t come together overnight, which meant Sidney and the rest of Silver Hollow’s residents had a good chance of making it go away permanently.

“Well, it sounds like you’re well on the way to making sure things never got up a good head of steam,” Ben told her. “When do you think you’ll have the next town hall?”

“Soon,” she said. “Eliza’s all fired up, and since she has half the afternoon to work because of her café only being open for breakfast and lunch, she’s already planning to do a bunch of canvassing tomorrow.

I have a feeling she should have enough signatures on her petition by the time the day is over. ”

Most likely, he shouldn’t have been too surprised by this. His mother and his little sister were both forces of nature as well, and when they got their minds set on something, it happened…and it happened fast.

“Good,” he said.

For a moment afterward, they were both quiet as they ate pizza and sipped wine. However, Ben knew he needed to say something about the real reason he’d come here.

Not just a possible unicorn sighting in the woods, but a dropped photograph of a woman taken on the day she graduated from college.

He cleared his throat, then decided he needed another swallow of wine to give him courage. His mother had always told him that a lie got bigger the longer you allowed it to continue, and boy, was he feeling that hard right now.

“I know the unicorn is real,” he blurted, and Sidney stared at him as if he’d sprouted a unicorn horn of his own.

“What?”

So, she was going to try to bluff. Not too surprising when you thought about the enormity of the secret she’d been hiding all this time.

“I read about it on a Reddit forum.”

Now both her brows lifted, and he could tell she was thinking that didn’t sound like a very convincing argument.

“Well, I suppose that means it must be true,” she remarked dryly, then took a too-casual bite of pizza.

“And I met your father in San Francisco.”

She stopped mid-chew, startled watercolor eyes staring at him in consternation.

However, she sounded elaborately neutral as she replied, “How do you know this guy you met was my father?”

Because Ben had expected her to bluff, he wasn’t too surprised by that response.

“He got out some money to pay the bartender. After he left, I noticed he’d dropped something, so I bent down to pick it up.

It was a picture of you at your graduation, and on the back, it said ‘Sidney, Humboldt State, 2021.’ And below that, whoever wrote the note added, ‘We wish you could have come to Silver Hollow for the party.’”

If there were unicorns in those woods, maybe there were gorgons as well, since Sidney now sat so still she might as well have been carved from stone.

And when she finally spoke, her voice was stony as well.

“But why come here?”

About a million reasons, none of them terribly easy to explain.

“I’d never heard of Silver Hollow,” he said.

“So I looked it up. It seemed like a total picture-postcard kind of place, but that’s not the reason why I dropped everything to check it out.

No, it was the odd entry on Reddit, the one that made it sound as if there was a lot more to the town — or, more specifically, the woods around it — than met the eye.

What cryptozoologist could resist a secret like that? ”

Again, she went silent. Her gaze wouldn’t meet his, and her face was so blank that he didn’t have a clue what she was thinking. Was she angry that he’d lied to her? Sad that he’d stirred up memories about a father she’d done her best to forget?

Worried that Silver Hollow’s secret wasn’t quite as secret as she’d hoped?

Then she looked straight at him and said, “Get out.”

For a second, he could only stare back at her. “What?”

“Get. Out.” Her jaw tightened, and she went on, “You lied to me. Here you’ve been pretending to be all friendly and nice, and you were just trying to find out what you could about this supposed unicorn or whatever else those conspiracy theory idiots on Reddit were yakking about. So…get the hell out of my house.”

Ben hesitated for just a second before he realized that anything he might try to say would fall on deaf ears.

Very angry deaf ears.

So he got up from his chair, murmured, “I’m sorry,” and headed toward the front door. The whole way, he kept hoping he would hear her telling him to stop, that she wanted to hear his side of the story, but no words came.

Just furious silence.

He let himself out and closed the door behind him.