Page 14

So that’s why you haven’t left town,” Archer says as I walk past him on the front porch. “My little sis found a boy to torment for the summer.”

“I’m not tormenting him.”

“Well, it sure as shit isn’t the other way around. You’re a Goode—we’re the thing they break their hearts against. We leave the shattered remains of their weepy lovesickness in our wake.”

I roll my eyes at him, opening the front door. “ You do that,” I say. “Not me.” I step into the house and shut the door before he can answer.

In my room, I blink down at the suitcase, clothes now spilling out onto the floor.

I should go.

I should walk to the train station, wait for it to open in the morning, buy a ticket, and leave this place once and for all.

But my whole body feels numb, vibrating with a tiredness unlike any I’ve ever known. I kick off my sandals and sink between the sheets of my bed. I let sleep pull me under, and I dream of the river, of fireflies buzzing in the air between Oak and me.

I dream of his lips touching mine, faintly, carefully. I dream he doesn’t let me go.

Not for anything.

Archer must see the strain in my face when I emerge from my room, the morning sun spearing through the trees, slanting into the old house, and he hands me a cup of lavender-and-lemon tea, nodding silently. He doesn’t ask again about the boy. He doesn’t ask if I’m leaving Cutwater.

He gives me the quiet I need to reassemble my thoughts.

Three days pass.

I should leave Cutwater. I don’t know why I stay. Why I move numbly through the house, while my brother paces at the windows, the useless shotgun resting beside the front door. When a car slows down along the road, or someone strolling by pauses to stare up at the house like they’re considering making the long walk up the drive to ask for a tulip, Archer grabs the gun and rushes out onto the porch, shouting at them to “get the hell away from our house.”

He’s doing the thing he does when he feels like our lives are out of control: he assumes the role of parent, guardian, protector. He takes the helm of our lives as if he could steer us back on course. But I know it’s already too late for that. This family has been sinking for generations—all we can do now is abandon ship, scramble aboard a lifeboat, and run for our lives before we’re swallowed up by the wet dirt.

But maybe this is why I stay.

My brother is anxious, fidgety, not himself, and it feels wrong to leave him right now.

I tell myself I’ll wait another day.

I tell myself it has nothing to do with Oak. That I’m not waiting for him to walk up the driveway, to knock on the door and tell me he’s sorry. Tell me why he turned cold and quiet that night on the river.

I’m not waiting for a boy.

I could leave at any time.

I sit at the end of my bed and stare down at the image of Oak. The portrait is done, the book cover in his hands now sketched in, but still I find myself shading in the trees around his face, adding tiny fireflies in the background. I keep my pencil always pressed to the paper, wearing it down, trying to understand what happened. What changed in his eyes.

But there are no answers in the gray pencil marks.

Archer has fallen asleep in the old armchair beside the unlit fireplace, his chin tipped back, mouth open, snoring gently—he sleeps only in short bursts now, jerking awake at the tiniest sound. Quietly I open the front door and step out onto the porch, needing the fresh air, but also hoping … hoping I’ll see Oak striding up the road, a book in his hand.

Regret in his eyes.

I sink into the old porch swing, my mind churning over every second we spent together, trying to unearth some clue, discover a piece I might have missed. A reason to explain why my heart stings every time I think of him. And why his heart doesn’t seem to feel a thing.

After an hour, the air turning windy and cool, a shadow comes into view out on the road….

I flinch upright.

But when I narrow my gaze through the dim light, I can tell—it’s not Oak.

Mrs. Thierry ambles to a stop at the end of our driveway, her dog, Peebles—a massive Great Dane—tugging at the end of a leash. She lives a half mile up the road in a two-story, Victorian-style home half-shrouded in vines and blackberry bushes that she refuses to cut back. She glares up the driveway, the evening light—shades of orange and raspberry ice cream—melting into the trees behind her, and she looks as if she’s casting some malediction, damning those who live in this house with an evil scourge.

But we’re already the damned.

She mumbles something, spits onto our driveway, then inclines her head so her shaky voice will carry. “You’ll curse us all with those flowers.” Her words are sandpaper and gravel. “Just like old, nasty Fern Goode did the day he moved here.” Mrs. Thierry knows the history of my family as well as anyone, because she’s older than most, and meaner. I also suspect many of the rumors about my family began with her: she loves a good gossip, a tall tale, and I can imagine the stories forming behind her gray eyes. “You’re stirring up things you shouldn’t, letting locals carry around those tulips.”

“They stole them,” I shout back, pointlessly, because maybe it doesn’t matter how they got them, only that the tulips will indeed stir up old, bad magic.

She and I stare at each other for a long moment—knowing that she wants the same thing as me: for the Goodes to leave this town and never come back. But at last she clicks her tongue and turns away, wobbling on up the road. She has a tendency to sway dangerously far toward the center line, cars speeding past, honking. But she is a woman who not even death can touch; she is unshakable, a woman who will surely live far longer than any of us.

“What did Mrs. Thierry want?” Archer asks when I step back into the house. He’s awake, standing in the kitchen, his hand in a mason jar of homemade granola—given to him by a girl with strawberry-red hair and sad blue eyes who left it on our front porch a week ago.

“To remind us how doomed we are.”

He snorts, like he finds this funny, but then his expression drops, as if he knows how true it is, and he falls quiet.

Dark settles over the house, and I lie awake in bed, my heart feeling like shredded paper. I want to see him , ask him what happened. But I also know it’s better left alone.

Better if I don’t see him again.

I should never have let myself get so close to him in the first place—his lips hovering against mine, soft and careful… but also careless . Needful and aching, the desire spinning upward in my chest like the lightning bugs flitting around us. I wanted him to kiss me, wanted all of it, wanted every second to shatter and burn apart like a storybook unraveling.

But all this wanting makes it impossible to push him away, to ease the twisting ache in the center of my ribs whenever I think of him.

I need to scrub him from my memory. I need to forget.

I need to leave.

A week flits by, and I keep telling myself that tomorrow is the day.

Tomorrow I’ll repack my suitcase, tell my brother goodbye, and walk until I reach the train station in town.

I promise myself that I’m staying only because my brother still seems on edge, because he’s worried someone else will sneak into the garden. And I don’t want to leave him alone.

I vow that by the next sunrise I’ll be long gone.

Still…

I watch the road. I feel a sense of waiting growing heavy against my rib cage.

But Oak doesn’t come to the house—he doesn’t leave books on my windowsill; he doesn’t stroll down Swamp Wells Road under the cover of night. My heart feels knotted and aching and unnatural—and I hate it.

I don’t understand it.

It makes no sense.

I hide the book he gave me— Peter and Wendy —with the sketch of him tucked inside the pages, stuffing it into the very back of my closet, pressed up against the wall, behind damp, forgotten clothes and an old handmade doll from my childhood.

I try to push him away. Cut him free from my mind like a rotted, gangrenous limb.

But…

It doesn’t work.

I walk down the tracks to the forgotten train car, and I lie on my back, staring up at the stars, imagining Oak lying beside me—every one of his exhales stirring loose the constellations above, rearranging the night sky. And when the other train roars down the tracks, I stand and feel the wind against my face. But Oak isn’t there to keep me from tipping over the edge. So I escape to the pond, strip free from my clothes, and sink beneath the surface, wishing the water were the same weight as his hands.

Wishing we had another chance.

I wish for stupid things.

“He’s not just going to materialize,” my brother says, finding me on the front porch staring down the empty driveway at the darkened road. Sunset an hour behind us.

“I wasn’t looking for—”

My brother raises an eyebrow. “You’re full of shit, little sis.”

I pull my knees up on the porch swing.

“You should have left a long time ago, after graduation, but you’re still here. You’re waiting for him.”

I frown. My hatred for this town, this house, has always been at my core, the center point that every decision pivots from. My reason for leaving. And yet, beyond all reason, there is now a second center of gravity. Sturdier, more dangerous than the first.

A boy. Who I need to forget.

“Even if he came walking up that driveway, could you trust anything he said? Anything he felt?”

“I’m not waiting for him.”

He cuts his eyes over me and smirks. “You might be able to lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me. I know why you sit out here on the porch every night, watching the road. You’re hoping that boy will appear.”

I exhale and look away from my brother. I know the point he’s trying to make, but I don’t want to hear it.

“It’s fine, I get it. But eventually you’ll need to decide what you want more: freedom from this town, or that boy.” He sinks onto the swing beside me and begins shelling peanuts from his pocket, tossing the brown husks over the railing into the creek, where they’re carried away beneath the house, then out through the tulip garden to the woods beyond.

I stand up.

I can’t take it anymore: this conversation, the waiting, the hole burning its way slowly through the soft muscle of my heart.

“Where you going?” Archer asks.

“Out.”

“It’s supposed to rain!” he calls.

But I stomp down the steps, over the creek, and down the driveway—without a word.

It’s not just the desperation I feel to be rid of this house, of my brother and my room and my notebook filled with the sketches of people I can never get close to; it’s the ticking in my skull for every day that’s passed, every hour, when I should have left this all behind. I should be counting the miles that separate me from this town.

But I can’t, not until I see him, not until I understand what went wrong.

This is the truth.

It’s not my brother that has kept me here.

It’s Oak.

I walk through the warm evening air, headed west, toward Favorville.

This is a bad idea.

But I don’t care.

Time unravels around me—I cross the county line, where the ground slopes up and the air feels crisp and mild and less humid—until I find myself walking up the long driveway to Oak’s house.

I don’t know what I’ll say to him; I haven’t rehearsed it in my head. I have no plan. Maybe I’ll tell him he’s an asshole for showing me the meadow, for taking me down the river, for getting so close to kissing me, then dropping me off at my house without a word.

Or maybe I’ll stand mute in front of him, forgetting all the reasons why I’m angry.

Because my heart is a savage thing.

And it can’t be trusted.

The air drains from my lungs the closer I get, and when I reach his house—built perfectly atop a grassy, moonless hill—I look back the way I came. I could leave now and he’d never know I was here. The specter of a girl slipping back into the quiet, loathsome, starry night. But I’d return home and my mind would continue to churn over the same questions.

It wouldn’t fix a thing.

So I choke down the doubt and move up the stone walkway to the front door. I knock twice and wait, but there are no footsteps from the other side. I press the doorbell and hear the soft chime echoing across the expansive house. A scattering of lights is visible through a narrow window, a lamp in a corner, another down a hallway. But the rest of the house is dark. It’s late; he could be asleep. Or he could be out wandering back roads, trying to lose himself in a story.

I cross my arms against the night air, against the cold, empty feeling sinking through me—I came all this way for nothing. Above me, the sky is beginning to fill with clouds, dark and baleful, a summer storm pushing west. But I don’t turn and head back down the driveway…. I’m a Goode, after all—stubborn, persistent—and I walk around the side of the house.

I want to be sure.

Down the slope I can see where the rowboat is pulled ashore.

But it’s not the only form in the dark.

A silhouette is seated beside it, angled toward a book in his hands, a few feet from the river’s edge.

My heart ratchets up into my throat, and before I can convince myself that there’s still time to leave, my legs carry me down the hill to the river.

I’m afraid to blink, afraid he’ll vanish into the night—only an echo, a shadow spun together in my mind. But the closer I get, the more real he becomes. Calm, restful, knees bent—reading in the dark. I feel a pang of hurt in my chest that doesn’t have a name, or even a word to describe it.

He doesn’t hear me approach, doesn’t lift his head until I’m only a few feet away, and his eyes suddenly snap up from the page.

Dark lashes.

Mouth tucked into a line.

He is beautiful at night, under the stars. Nameless, tenuous. But the calm I saw in his face is now gone.

He closes the paperback and stands up quickly. “What are you doing here, Lark?” His voice is like melted wax, burning my skin.

“I…” My own voice fails me, crumbles, and I look away, back the way I came to the road in the distance. My way out of here.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he adds, but I can hear the doubt in his voice, a molecule-sized flicker of hesitation. He doesn’t believe his own words.

I meet his eyes—finding the part of myself that won’t turn around and go home until I have answers. Until I understand. “I don’t know what happened before, the other day, on the river,” I say firmly. “But I know something changed. I just need you to tell me why…. I need you to talk to me.”

He looks to the ground, a wretched silence breaking across his face, like he’s recalling that day in the boat: remembering the words we spoke that made his heart close up, made him regret taking me down the river and up to the meadow. “I need to tell you something….” He swings his gaze back to me, the green rims of his eyes looking like they could pierce me clean through, a blade and a balm all at once. “I should have told you earlier.” He scrapes a hand along the back of his neck, his eyes filling with fear, with a hurt I don’t understand. And I’m afraid of what he’s going to say.

That it was all a mistake.

Him and me. And the what-if that lingers between us.

I root my feet to the earth, trying to hold myself together.

But the sky cracks open instead—a mantle of storm clouds scraping across the horizon, turning everything black—and a second later a downpour of summer rain crashes over us. I wince, the sound deafening, drops exploding against the earth, pinging off the boat, and I’m surprised when Oak reaches out for me, takes my hand in his, and pulls me toward the house.

My breath shakes in my lungs as we run, and we’re soaked by the time he pushes through a back door and we step into a quiet, dark room: a mudroom lined with boots and sneakers against one wall, coats hanging from hooks on the other. Organized and tidy. Clean.

Rain spills from my hair, drips from my clothes onto the floor.

“Wait here,” he says softly, releasing my hand and vanishing into another room. A light is switched on somewhere, and I can see a kitchen illuminated ahead of me. I step into the massive space, with a gray concrete floor and white countertops, cream-colored walls and a lemon scent. I blink, trying to take it all in. It’s the kind of home I’ve read about in books but never imagined I’d see in real life.

Oak appears behind me, holding out a large white towel. “Here,” he says, his voice changed, all its sharp edges gone. He folds the towel over my shoulders, but it isn’t enough; my whole body trembles, the cold saturating my skin. “You need dry clothes,” he adds, clutching my shivering hands in his, before turning and slipping away into another part of the massive house. I sense that he doesn’t want me here: His home is a place he wants to keep private. Secret. A part of his life he doesn’t share.

The cold sinks even deeper, my bones feeling like they’re rattling against my skin. I clutch the towel around my shoulders and step carefully into the living room—searching for a source of heat. But it feels like a museum, hardly lived in, all modern, clean lines and cold walls. Not the kind of place where a family wakes up on birthday mornings, the smell of waffles rising through the air while the sound of laughter echoes down the halls. This is a home of ghosts. Of a past left to die.

A fireplace stands against the far wall, and I find a switch on the right side that ignites the fire. A quick burst of light illuminates the vast room, and I hold my hands toward the gas-fed flames, the heat starting to dry my shivering skin.

Above the fireplace, the mantel is lined with framed photographs—the first sign that a family resides inside this catacomb. I scan each one, photos of Oak as a young boy, with warm green eyes and dark hair cut short. His mom is in several of the images, a woman with amber skin and long, dark hair and bright, beautiful eyes. I see Oak in her, in the kind, gentle slant of her face. I peer at photographs of their family at the beach, at an amusement park, Oak waving from a Ferris wheel. A few depict Halloween costumes, and several show the family beside Rabbit Cross River, Oak and his mom sitting in the same green boat he took me in days ago. His father is visible in only a handful of images—he was likely the one always snapping the photos. He is a tall man, like Oak, with broad shoulders and gray eyes. He is handsome, and there’s something enigmatic, perplexing, about him—the same unnameable quality I see in Oak.

At the end of the row of photos, a stack of books rests on the mantel. They are old books, small, and most of the spines are so worn, they’re unreadable. They look like poetry volumes. But it’s not the books that my eyes settle on, it’s the corner of something beneath the stack.

A single, loose photograph. I don’t know why my eyes linger on it, why I feel compelled to pull it free from under the books—there is a throb at my temple, a prick of curiosity from some unknown place inside me.

I slide the photo free, holding it carefully between my fingers.

The light from the fireplace dances across the image, and my mind tumbles over itself, confused, off-balance, unsure what I’m looking at.

Oak’s father is standing on a dock, nestled in a harbor, the mast of a sailboat rising up behind him, the afternoon sun slanted over his features.

But the woman standing beside him… is not Oak’s mom.

It’s someone else.

A woman with sable hair and dark, bewitching eyes. A woman with betrayal in her smile, a woman who left everything she knew and broke apart her family without a word.

The woman is not Oak’s mom.

She’s mine.

My eyes shiver over the photo, trying to take in every detail: Oak’s father with his arm around her waist, her shoulder leaning into him.

My head thuds.

My heart begins to scream in my ears.

When Mom left, she fled Cutwater without a word. There was a secret inside her, a lie, a deceit. But I’ve always wondered if she left with someone she’d met. A man she kept secret from us. A man who couldn’t resist a woman with the Goode last name. A man who finally helped her escape this town.

And now, fingers trembling, I wonder if this is the secret.

Tears well quick and icy behind my eyes, but the anger is scalding in my chest. And when I look up, Oak is standing at the edge of the hallway. Watching me.

He’s shirtless, wearing a dry pair of jeans. But his eyes fall, and he sees what I hold in my hand. His face loses all meaning.

“Did you know?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer, his chest rising quickly with each inhale.

“My mother? And your father?”

His jawline contracts, all the lies reflected back in his face. “I wanted to tell you,” he tries. “I was going to…” He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t look away from me either.

My head spins, confused. Mom never mentioned Oak’s dad—but she rarely talked about the men in her life. She swung easily from one romance to another. Like Archer, she never took love seriously, never considered the crumpled hearts she left in her wake. It was always about survival. And she didn’t care who got hurt.

“My mom left with your dad…,” I mutter, trying to piece it together. “And you knew it. All along?” The photo in my hand starts to feel heavy, like it’s gaining weight, like it’s going to slip from my fingers and fall into the fire, burning to nothing. “Is this why you were following me, why you came to my school that first day?” I try to remember how to breathe, but the air tastes like dust. Like everything he never said. “Because you knew who my mom was?”