“Full moon,” I mutter.
He nods. “Yourring is undamaged. It will work in daytime or at night during full and dark moon cycles. At night only on the perfect quarters. But the damaged ring, we’ve only been able to make it work for crossings at night during perfect full moons, and even then, rarely.”
I’m…stunned and processing, and I hate that he looks worried for me.
“We must get you back to the estate and hide you, somehow. Imustkeep you safe.”
Taking my hand, he leads the way, and it feels so familiar and yet so strange that I can barely process it. We move quickly through the dark woods, but I sense dawn’s twilight closing in on us. It’s hard to fight the edge of panic gripping my system, to remember thatIam not in danger from the sun.
I’ve lived my life for so long respecting the cycles of the sun because of who I worked for and because of my personal issues that I didn’t realize exactly how much I had internalized that fear.
When we reach the edge of the woods, we drop down behind a large boulder at the outer perimeter of the fields. “No, this will not work,” he mutters. “I cannot risk taking you across the fields. It is too bright already.”
As the sky lightens to the east, I spot the large house from my distant memories perched in the middle of the group of fields and surrounded by shade trees.
“Come.” He takes my hand again and, once more, we’re moving through the trees at the edge of the fields, angling away from the fields until they are no longer visible through the forest. Eventually, he pulls up short and leaves me in a thick copse of trees. He walks ahead, returning in a few minutes.
“Youstayhere. You will be safe here.”
“Where are you going?”
“I will return to the estate and get a vehicle from the garage. I will say I need to fetch something from the market. Parxon doesn’t like me driving and prefers I take a driver, but the driver is not at the estate this early. I will travel to town to buy something from the shops to set my story. On my return, I will pull over and call for you when it is safe. You will stay hidden in the vehicle until we are in the garage and I confirm the house is empty.”
Terror fills me. I’m honestly not sure if I could find my way back to the stone ring by myself now. If I can’t get there, I can’t reach Dexter. “How long?”
He hugs me. “Not long, little one. Maybe an hour. Here.” He removes his watch and fastens it to my wrist. I realize now the numbers don’t look like numbers I’m used to, but I can still read them.
A memory pops into mind, of Dad and Zuzu teaching me their alphabet and numbers.
How did I not rememberthat?
Then he kisses my forehead again and is off like a flash before I can stop him.
The woods begin to fill with a purply kind of light as dawn crests and breaks beyond the large, gentle valley the estate sits in. I pull my cell phone out of my back pocket and look at the time. 5:48.
Of course, I have no signal.
Obviously.
A hysterical burp of laughter bubbles free before I can stop it.
When I compare the time on the watch to the phone, it matches nearly identically, only a few seconds off from each other when the minutes change.
Okay. I can do this.
Maybe.
God, I hope Dexter made it to the hotel okay. I turn off my cell phone to save the battery. It’ll go dead quickly at this rate, as it tries to find a signal.
That’s when the shakes hit me, along with a renewed bout of tears.
I remember nights spent sleeping over at Zuzu’s, the two of us curled under a blanket on the couch in the living room in front of the fireplace, with him reading adventures to me from books that were ornately illustrated in a way I never saw in books at home. Pictures that almost seemed to shimmer and move, as if alive. I remember standing on a chair in his kitchen and learning how to choporhtanfor soup, a root vegetable like carrots. Baking cookies with him.
Maybe that’s why I suppressed so many memories. Maybe Dex is right, that it was too painful to lose both of them. I remember feeling a flash of anger that Zuzu couldn’t be with us when Dad was gone, wondering why he wouldn’t come to us.
Wondering why he’d leave us alone if he loved us so much.
I can look back on what I remember now and clearly see the duality of existence that wasn’t visible to me as a child. I see the lengths the three of them went to keep this secret.
