Page 24

MORNING CAME COLD and bright. Mist clung to the ridgeline, and the scent of woodsmoke curled low over the hollow.

Willow followed Cole single file down a narrow footpath, one she hadn’t seen the night before, though it cut directly behind Ruby and Brooxie’s house.

Cole’s boots crushed wet leaves. He’d hardly spoken since they’d started the trek.

They passed a sagging wire fence and ducked under a chain of spiked dog collars that hung between two trees. A spike grazed Willow’s upper arm, and she winced, stopping to see if the scrape had drawn blood.

Blood was so fascinating. So vital. When she was a kid, she’d loved picking off her scabs and watching the welling red bead.

She didn’t like seeing other people’s blood, of course. Only her own. And only in manageable amounts.

“You good?” Cole called over his shoulder.

“Yeah, just...” She twisted to show off her scrape, which hadn’t drawn blood. Still, the spike had traced a vivid white line through her flesh.

Cole grunted, unimpressed. “Be more careful. You could get tetanus in a heartbeat.”

“From a dog collar?”

“Or a rusted nail or a piece of bent siding. This isn’t Atlanta, Willow. Dogs out here have teeth.”

She rolled her eyes. Dogs out here have teeth. What a dumb thing to say. Dogs everywhere had teeth. And everywhere, dogs came in all shapes and sizes. What would he think if she told him about Mr. Chapman?

She wouldn’t because once she did, she’d never be able to take it back, and forever afterward he’d look at her differently.

But if she did. Would he want to hunt Mr. Chapman down and punch him? Sic a dog on him, a dog with teeth?

The trail widened into a crude path where scavenged boards formed a kind of walkway.

Most were slick or splintered. One held the rusted remains of a mousetrap, still set.

Willow sidestepped it and pressed on. Her thighs ached from yesterday’s long hike.

Her borrowed boots were a size too small.

Cole was being moody and dark, all scowls and hunched eyebrows, but even so—Willow felt alive.

Her skin prickled with it, that breathless feeling just before a story got to the really good part.

Her life was starting here. Now. That’s how it felt.

Not in Atlanta. Not in a classroom with Mr. Chapman pretending not to stare. Not in her mother’s voice, brittle with cheer, or Ash’s scorn when she’d dropped out of Emory.

Here, in Lost Souls, the trees kept secrets. Here, the path—oh, please—led to answers and no more dead ends.

They rounded a bend, and Willow stopped, shocked by what lay in front of her.

The settlement sat in a low bowl of land surrounded by hills steep as prayer hands.

She counted seven structures total, all crooked in different ways.

Sheet metal roofing. Cinder blocks stacked for steps.

A sofa with its stuffing spilling out sat propped against a tree trunk, and on the roof of one tilted house, a line of metal folding chairs pretended to be tin soldiers.

Cole turned and held out his hand. “Stay close.”

She hesitated, then clasped his palm. It was warm, strong, and real.

A girl of about ten watched them from a porch rail, her feet swinging back and forth. She held a string leashed around the neck of a goat. Willow gave her a tentative wave. The girl didn’t blink.

“This place gives me the creeps,” she said to Cole, pitching her voice low. “Does that make me a bad person?”

Cole squeezed her hand. “If this place didn’t give you the creeps? That’d make you a dead person sooner rather than later. You’re fine. We’re fine. And we’re almost there, regardless.”

They passed a row of blackened stumps where candles had once been burned to waxy nubs. Beyond that slumped a cabin that looked like it had been constructed entirely out of furniture bits. It was like a Lincoln Logs house, only made from drawers rather than logs.

A little boy darted out from behind one of the drawers. He was maybe six or seven, with an uneven buzz cut highlighting the boniness of his skull. He was skinny and dirty and had trails of snot beneath each nostril. He sucked them in. They oozed back out.

“Lady?” he called. “Hey, lady! You got anything for me?” He stuck out a filthy hand.

“Oh!” said Willow. Feeling wrong-footed, she felt for her wallet, which she’d shoved deep into her right front pocket.

Careful with her fingers, she reached within and pulled free a twenty dollar bill. “You know what? I do.”

The kid saw green paper, and his eyes went huge.

Cole saw green paper and swatted Willow’s hand down. “What are you doing? Are you nuts?”

“Please, lady? Please?” begged the little boy. He was barefoot, but still he was hopping up and down among all these thorns and roots and tetanus opportunities just waiting to pounce.

“Hold on, tiger,” Cole told the kid. He grabbed Willow and pulled her away. “Willow, put your money away.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll be wasting it. He’ll run and tell everyone in the holler, and they’ll all be out here with cupped hands and pleading eyes.”

“I won’t!” the kid cried, circling around and trying to edge up close. “I won’t tell no one, I swear!”

Cole gave the kid a look. The kid froze where he stood. To Willow, he growled, “It’s sweet that you care, but you can’t save everyone.”

“ Ohhh ,” Willow said. “Okay, Cole, thanks for explaining. Only guess what?”

“What?”

“This is one kid , and I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that twenty dollars would mean a lot to him. And no, this isn’t me playing princess among the peasants. I’m not here to be anyone’s savior.”

“Oh, I know. You made that crystal clear last night.”

Willow lifted her chin defiantly. “Isn’t offering some help better than none at all?”

Cole tugged at his hair and turned away from her. “Good Lord, woman. You are the most infuriating creature I have ever met.”

That made Willow feel better. She liked being called infuriating. She liked being called woman , especially in that tough, macho, country-boy way Cole wore so well.

Good Lord, woman.

Yes, man?

Not that Willow was looking for a man. Not a mortal man, and certainly not this mortal man. It wasn’t like that. But she’d take Cole’s rough-hewn impatience over Mr. Chapman’s well-mannered flattery any day.

Her heart sank, and her pleasant feeling of self-satisfaction crumbled like dust. Screw Mr. Chapman. Screw him for still existing in her hidden crevices, for slipping not through the cracks of the world but the cracks of her , no matter how hard she tried to plaster those cracks over.

She kicked at a rock, only she misjudged and drove her toe straight into unforgiving granite, a chunk of it wedged deep in the soil. Pain ricocheted up her foot despite the protection of the borrowed work boots.

Cole circled back to her. He had his now, listen face on and was no doubt all geared up to deliver part two of his lecture on Why He Was Right and She Was Nothing but a Silly Girl.

Then he saw that she was fighting back tears— not because of Mr. Chapman but because of how much her toe hurt—and his expression softened.

“It’s good of you to care,” he said, moving closer and placing his hands on her shoulders. “There are better ways to go about it, that’s all. Because say you give this kid twenty bucks. What happens next?”

“He walks down to the Piggly Wiggly? He buys twenty dollars’ worth of candy that’ll rot his teeth out? So what, if it makes him happy?”

“Happy for twenty minutes, maybe.”

“Oh, c’mon. Longer than that.” What she wanted to say, but wouldn’t, was, And if it was Micah? Would you slap away the hand of someone trying to help Micah?

“At any rate, that’s assuming the kid sees a dime of it,” Cole said. “What happens when his daddy takes that twenty dollars and buys a bottle of Old Crow, a jug of Wild Irish Rose, and three packs of Camels?”

Willow blinked.

“Maybe he remembers his kid,” Cole went on.

“Maybe he does, and he tosses in a couple of Pixy Stixs at the register. Blue ones, if they’ve got them.

Not because they’re his kid’s favorites, but because they were the ones he liked best, if memory serves.

And he remembers what it was like to have something sweet and bright that was all his own, even if the happiness lasted only two minutes. ”

Cole dropped his arms to his sides and gave Willow a crooked smile. “So what do I know? Maybe it is better. Maybe this is what better looks like.”

“It is,” the kid said. He’d crept back up without them noticing.

“And I’d do real good with that money, you have my word on it.

I’d buy my sister that baby doll she wants—Strawberry Shortcake or something like that.

Eliza says her hair smells like real strawberries.

” The kid’s eyes went dreamy. “And for me? I’d get a jawbreaker.

One of the big ones you can’t hardly hold in your mouth, the kind you gotta work on all day.

And a toy car, but not the plastic kind.

One of them metal ones with doors that open and shut. ”

He hesitated. “For my daddy, I think I’d get him one of them lighters from behind the counter. The nice kind. Silver. If he had one of those, he’d stop using matches and burning his fingers.”

His voice dropped to a whisper. “He gets mad when he does that.”

Willow blinked away her blurry vision and smiled at the kid, who sucked his snot back in for the fifth time. “That’s a really good plan. I like the way you think, bud.”

She handed him the bill, and he accepted it reverently, looking up at Willow with huge brown eyes.

“I’ll still have enough left for a Pixy Stix, right? One of the blue ones?”

Willow’s throat went tight. “Is blue your favorite?”

“I don’t know. Is blue your favorite?”

Willow hadn’t had a Pixy Stix since... she couldn’t remember when. Didn’t they all taste the same? Weren’t they just sugar doused in dye?

“Blue is one hundred percent my favorite,” she said.