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But it wasn’t like that.

I was still worried about the stupid wallet, though I had stopped looking for it at that point. I’d turned Damian’s car inside out, and it wasn’t there. I had gone looking all the other places that we’d all been together.

Eventually, I had given up.

Damian had stopped texting me back and stopped answering his phone. Earlier, he’d told me he was going to intercept her and tell her that he didn’t have the wallet, and that he would send her to look in his car, but that had been hours ago.

So, I went home, and I told myself that they hadn’t gotten in touch with me because they must have found the wallet and everything was okay. That was the only reason not to get in touch with me, after all.

Hours later, Vincent texted me to ask if Damian was responding to my texts, and I immediately panicked.

No, I texted back. And he’s not answering his phone.

He has my truck, Vincent texted back.

I texted that Damian was supposed to be intercepting Opal, who was driving up the mountain, and that I was going to drive up there and see if I could find them. Immediately, all sorts of awful scenarios began running through my head, but they were all of the unconscious-after-a-bad-car-accident variety, that both of them had been hurt.

I scolded myself for not going after them both earlier. How could I have convinced myself that everything was fine? I should have realized that when neither of them were getting in touch with me, something had gone badly.

I started driving up the winding road that went up the mountain where the hunting shack was.

The mountain was on the other side of Riverside. The river carved its way through this mountain range. This mountain was the one always visible from town, always visible if I was floating on the river on my back. There it would be, majestic against the sky, rising over us all. It always seemed to keep watch over our town.

The road that wound up it had yellow lines painted in the middle but no lines painted on the sides and no shoulder of any kind. The pavement was cracked in places, the yellow lines in the middle faded.

People lived up here, so there were houses every so often off the road—some small and squat, like the hunting shack where the guys had gone for the weekend, others new construction, built to overlook the side of the mountain, two stories high with balconies and porches.

Vincent called as I was driving up. His voice was choked. “Leo, do not come up here,” he said. “Turn around. Go back down the mountain now.”

“What happened?” My voice was small. “Is he okay?” I thought he was dead, because otherwise, why would Vincent tell me not to come up there? “Did you call an ambulance? Did you feel for a pulse?”

“He’s not hurt,” said Vincent.

Relief splintered through me. “Oh, thank the ancestors!”

“But don’t, Leo, turn around,” he said.

“Why?” I said. “Why, what happened?”

Silence on the other end of the phone.

“Vincent?” I said.

“Fuck, Leona, I do not want to be the person to tell you this,” he said.

“What about Opal? Did you find Opal?”

Another long silence.

Meanwhile, I was taking the curves too fast, pushing my car up the mountain, up the meandering road.

An old stone church came into view. I had seen it before. It was one of those churches that only had services once a month because it was serviced by a traveling preacher who went between four different churches each month. With the wolves out here, the people in the area weren’t super religious. Attendance was sparse.

The stone of the church was gray, and there was a triangular spire reaching for the sky, a cross topping it. A gnarled tree, dripping red and orange leaves, stretched its limbs over the wooden arched door.

In the parking lot, there was Vincent’s car and Opal’s car and Jimmy’s car.

I swerved and pulled in, hanging up my phone.