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. Orhe 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.
