The light stretching through the sky reveals enough of his face to make me think he might want the same thing.
“Yeah?” I shift my grip on the branch. “How’s that?”
“Like I wa?—”
“The hell y’all doin’ in there?” Sunny’s voice cuts through the night and makes us both swear. “You fools better get movin’ if you don’t wanna end up on Leeds.”
Nash shakes his head and takes a step back. Nodding toward the branch, he says, “Go.”
Right.
I shift my focus to crawling on my hands and knees up the long limb without damaging it. The bark digs into every point of contact with my skin.
I am climbing a preserved tree in the dark in hopes of finding missing gold I desperately need, but all I can think of is the way Nash was just looking at me.
The way I was looking at him.
The way I wanted both of us to keep doing just that because there’s clearly something wrong with me.
At the top, I let out a shaky exhale and crouch at the base of the branch.
“What do you see?” Nash calls, farther away than I expect when I glance down.
I turn on my flashlight. “Leaves.” I sift through the crevices at the pit where the branches twist together to meet. “Moss.” I keep digging through the organic matter. “A used condom.”
“What?” he shouts.
This time, I laugh, peering over the edge so I can see him. “Just kidding.”
“Ten minutes,” Leroy shouts from the other side of the fence.
I continue to search—there’s nothing. Leaves, moss, sticks, small random bits of trash that must have blown in.Damn.
Think, think, think.
I shine the light out on the branches—no marks. Nothing. Angel Oak is a big tree with a lot of history but no sign of what I need.
My heart sinks.
Two places and not a single sign of the gold existing.
If I waste weeks on this only for it to be nothing, we’ll lose everything. Jonathan already thinks I can’t do this; maybe Ican’t. Maybe it really isn’t here. Maybe it’s nowhere. Maybe we’ll lose everything.
“Rue,” Nash calls. “We have to go.”
“Coming.” I shove the flashlight into my pocket and make quick work of my descent on the same branch that led me up.
“Nothing,” I tell him when I’m on the ground, wiping bark bits from my hands and legs. I scan the perimeter for anything I could have missed. Anywhere else Anson would have left a clue.
I don’t have a single other idea.
Nash tilts his head toward the gate, the same disappointment filling his face that I feel on mine.
Hammer to nail, it strikes me right there that he’s not upset because we didn’t find anything: His disappointment is for me.
Jonathan, as wonderful as he is, would never do something like this. He isn’t. Cap was right. He’s carrying on like he always does, while Nash just broke into a historic site, and I have no clue why other than his ceaseless quest for fun. Yet here he is. Underneath the oldest tree east of the Mississippi, this realization splits me in half.
“Hey.” Halfway to the gate, I stop Nash with a hand on his arm. It’s not the right time, but it’s like this tree amplifies the urgency of every thought I have. “Do you think the gold is here? In Charleston, I mean?”
