seven.
He’d been a tiny scrap of a kid, not yet grown into his bones, so small and vulnerable, the way delicate birds seemed vulnerable. His hair, nearly as messy as he wore it now, a chaos of dark brown spikes and waves. Huge eyes dimmed with anxiety and dread—before he’d learned to turn all of that into fury.
Because Dany had reminded Marsden about Jude’s father, hadn’t she, after the news of Rigby Ambrose had spread throughout Glory? How Leo Ambrose had moved his young family out West after he lost his job due to his drinking. How his wife died of cancer not long after. How his drinking spun even more out of control and his sons met his fists. All of it, leaking throughout the town like bad gas, borne on whispers and sly glances and the kind of boredom so deep it almost welcomed danger.
A clumsily bandaged wrist as Jude walked around outside during recess.
A split lip as he entered the classroom.
Then, one spring weekend in the public library. Marsden had been seven and Jude eight. His bronze-hued cheek had been red and puffed, his eyes wet and streaming, as she watched him run between towers of books toward an older boy. His flight had been desperate and terrorized, full of fear. She’d felt all of that crash into her own heart, so that it hurt for him, too, this schoolmate she only knew by name.
She’d been in the next aisle, browsing the cookbooks—Star had promised to bake cookies with her the next time she visited, Marsden’s choice of recipe—when the pounding of sneakered feet came from behind the racks of books at her side. She heard muffled crying, comforting murmurs.
She’d walked to the end of the aisle and peeked over.
There was Jude, crying into the shoulder of an older boy. He seemed huge by comparison, this other boy, his shoulders and hands and feet all oversize—only his soft cheeks and long, messy limbs gave away how young he was still. Marsden saw how his skin was the exact same shade as Jude’s, all ambers and sweet molasses. They had the same eyes, too, full of glints and hidden hues that only peeked out depending. Her own eyes were like that, not wanting to give things away.
That older boy would have been Rigby, she knew now. Doing his best to protect his little brother from their father, even if Jude’s swollen cheek told her Rigby had been too slow that day. And seeing Rigby’s expression, the tears in his own eyes as he struggled to convince Jude he would be fine, she saw how he hated himself for it.
She knew that feeling now, too, didn’t she? How each time she failed Wynn, it ate at her like a strange hunger, the kind that no food could fix? How it made her realize all over again that she was not good enough to make up for all the bad, not strong enough to save anything?
If she ever heard Rigby in the covert, she’d tell him she understood all of it. How lonely it was to save someone. How his leaving had left Jude hollow, but that his brother was still here, and alive, and so he hadn’t failed at all.
And, maybe, then she’d ask something of him.
If he knew of her father. If somewhere in the covert, Grant Eldridge still had a voice.
Then Jude was grabbing her hand, jolting her back to the present and the covert, stopping her from walking any farther.
“The squirrel’s right at our feet.” His face was amused, wanting to laugh. And his voice was still husky, but no longer scraped or painful sounding, just full of valleys and low, soft slopes. He dropped her hand. “Hidden in the grass.”
The ghost of his touch lingered like the long, measured stroke of a sure brush on paper. Marsden ignored the sensation and ripped up the rest of her half of the piece of toast, dropping the pieces onto the ground near where they stood.
Jude started to do the same. “Captivity for toast. Seems fair enough to me.”
It didn’t escape her, the way it was both strange yet completely normal to be standing there with him, just outside the place where his brother had shot himself weeks ago. In that moment, more than anything, she wanted to ask him if it really had been his dad who used to hurt him. If he was still being hurt. If that was why he always looked ready to hurt someone back.
“So you live at the boardinghouse with your family?” He tossed the last of his toast into the grass. “And work there as a cook? Your mom’s a housekeeper there, right?”
Marsden’s mind raced, trying to decipher if he was being sarcastic in pretending to not know. If unspoken facts were simply lies to him, or stories, or rumors.
“Who told you we lived there?” she finally managed.
“That girl who found me here outside the covert. I’m guessing she’s your sister?”
She nodded. “Her name’s Wynn.” Who was now going to be served eggs every day for breakfast for the rest of the summer—for the rest of the entire year.
“I asked her where I could find you, so she told me you were still at home. Then she pointed to the boardinghouse.”
Surprise wiped away all further thoughts of punishment for Wynn. She realized now that he never did say why he came to be there, waiting outside her woods as though he were guarding it. Or spying. “You were actually looking for me?”
A second of hesitation, then Jude pulled out the book he’d tucked into his shorts pocket. He unrolled it, showing her the front.
Putting Together the Perfect Time Capsule. The cover was worn and scratched up. He handed it to her, his expression uncertain again, vulnerable. “Open it, please.”
Marsden did, even though she was lost. Why was he showing her a kids’ book?
The pages inside were laminated, protection from sticky and careless fingers. Someone had written on them, the handwriting that of a child’s. There were lists and arrows and charts.
She flipped more pages and dried blooms whirled free.
Leaves, palm-size, in the shape of a heart.
The familiar scent of wild ginger filled her nose as the leaves danced around them to land at their feet. It was the covert, leaving traces of itself on their skin, in the breaths they breathed.
She should have instantly thought of death, of sad, lonely things. And she did. But standing there with Jude, some of her thoughts also stayed with him—with the book he’d brought for her—so that she was curious, confused.
The grim expression had crept back into his eyes. It was now laced with a painful kind of hope, and she braced herself for anything and everything.
“Rigby had a time capsule, and it’s buried somewhere in the covert,” he said. “I need to find it. I need to dig it up.”