With the windows down in the back of Shawn’s Ford Escape so that Tina’s nails could dry, Griselda wasn’t expected to make conversation with her, which was a relief. Tina seemed nice enough, but with every mile, they headed deeper into West Virginia, and Griselda’s dread multiplied. Her stomach wouldn’t settle, and her fingers trembled if she wasn’t tightly clasping them her lap. Making small talk would have been excruciating if not impossible. Trying to find a bit of peace, she leaned her elbow on the windowsill, keeping her eyes closed and letting the warm wind buffet her face.

Try as she might, however, she couldn’t think about anything but her sad history with this corner of the world and finally succumbed to her memories. How hopeful she’d been when she’d walked into the Charles Town sheriff’s office ten years ago. How hopeful. How stupid.

By the time the police arrived at the Man’s house, Holden and the Man were long gone, but Griselda hadn’t known that terrible fact quite yet. She’d watched with relief as the police put out an APB on Holden Croft, two cop cars tearing out of the parking lot headed for the Man’s house. Her aching feet and legs had screamed in pain as she rolled her chair forward and reached for the Oreos, savoring the first bite after three solid years of gruel and raw produce.

  The Fillmans had been removed from the foster care system after losing two charges over state boundaries, so Griselda was taken to the first of three foster families back in Washington, D.C.. That’s where she met her new roommate, Maya, who immediately reminded Griselda of Marisol.

Over the next three or four days, she was enrolled in a nearby junior high school and interviewed by the police many times about Holden and the Man, but the visits quickly stopped. A few days later, she found out why.

Her new social worker visited her a week after the escape and shared the devastating news—when the police got to the Man’s house, it had been abandoned. No Man. No boy. Just a dog shot through the head and buried in a shallow grave on the front lawn.

“Cutter,” she gasped, trembling as she wondered if the same gun had been used on Holden.

The Charles Town police searched the area for a full week but came up dry—there was no trace of Holden or the Man, who, Griselda learned for the first time, was named Caleb Foster. The social worker asked if Griselda had any idea where they may have gone, but she didn’t. Other than the barn, garden, and cellar, she and Holden hadn’t been allowed anywhere else, certainly not in the main house. And in the three years she and Holden had lived there, they hadn’t left the farm once. She knew almost nothing about him. She had no idea where he’d go. She only knew that she had to get back to his house and try to figure it out.

  That night she made her first attempt to run away, stupidly hitchhiking at the end of her foster mother’s street and being picked up by the police on suspicion of solicitation. Her foster mother locked her in her bedroom at night after that, and Griselda didn’t tried to run away again. But when the next spring rolled around, she longed for Holden with a fierceness that left her breathless and weak every morning. She ran away the second time that June and got a little farther, but a well-meaning trucker radioed in her location, and again the police picked her up. She was transferred to another foster home. Again the lockdown, again the defeat. The following June, she tried again, but when she was picked up outside of Leesburg, her social worker told her she’d go to juvie if she tried it again. They also switched her to the worst and strictest of her three foster homes, separating her from Maya. At this house, she shared a bedroom with two other girls who had also tried to run. There were bars on the windows, and they were locked in every night with a dead bolt.

The threat of juvie didn’t scare Griselda. It just inspired her to be smarter. That year she didn’t run. That year she smartened up and came up with a plan: Earn trust. Get a job. Make money. Buy clothes. Dye your hair. Take the bus back to West Virginia. Figure out what happened to Holden.

Holden. Holden. Holden. Holden.

When August rolled around, right before senior year, she put her plan into action. She’d saved up $200 from her summer job at Wendy’s, which meant she had enough to take the bus from D.C. all the way to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

  Her plan worked too. No one bothered a young woman wearing a baseball cap and minding her business on an early morning bus. She made it to Harpers Ferry in two and a half hours, hefted her pack on her back, and walked west on Route 340 toward Charles Town. Seven miles and three hours later, she stopped at a diner, where she bought a tuna sandwich and got her bearings. It was another four-hour walk down Kabletown Road to the vicinity of Caleb Foster’s farm. By the time she got there, the sun was much lower in the sky.

   As she walked up the dusty path from the road, she could tell the place hadn’t been lived in for years. The grass was high and unkempt, and the paint on the house and the barn was peeling worse than it had been three years ago. But even more than that, there was a dead feeling to the place: no animals, no people, no fear, no hope, no life. Empty. Like a vacuum.

As she approached the abandoned house, Griselda could see that several windows were broken and the porch sagged in the corner where Caleb Foster used to sit on a stool in the shade reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy aloud, over and over again, in a booming, terrifying voice, as Griselda and Holden tended to the garden in the hot sun for hours on end.

He hath uncovered his sister’s nakedness; he shall bear his iniquity . . . Cursed be he that lieth with his sister . . .

She hated that she knew the words by heart. She hated that they ran through her mind on autopilot as she stared at the porch. She hated that her mind would never be free of them.

Auction notices were stapled to the front door and the two porch pillars, and the warm afternoon breeze made them flap lightly. At the base of the pillars were two long, rusted metal chains, the ends hidden somewhere under the porch. Griselda didn’t need to see the ends of the chains to know what was there. Her ankle twitched in remembrance of the tight metal cuff she’d been forced to wear on gardening days—a cuff that kept her tethered to the porch.

A shiver ran through her as she looked to the little garden plot where she’d first told Holden about her plan for escape. It was nothing but dead, dusty earth now, though she could still make out the several dozen rows they’d painstakingly created and tended together. She could almost hear the metallic jingle of the long, long chains that had almost sounded musical in the very beginning. Like Christmas bells with every step they took. Like the hope of being rescued.

“Oh, Holden,” she sobbed, sinking to the lowest porch step, her legs weary and her eyes burning. “Holden, I’m so sorry.”

What had she expected to find here? Sixteen-year-old Holden waiting for her? Freckled, tall, and healthy, smiling at her in hello? Stupid girl. They’d told her he was gone, and he was. Gone. And it was such a long way to come only to find nothing.

She flicked her glance to the back of the house, picturing the storm cellar doors in her mind. Caleb Foster would hold their chains in one hand and open each exterior door at the end of the day, when they were forced back into the dark hole. The old, sturdy doors would creak and growl, and he’d unlock their ankles right before they made their descent down the crumbling cement steps. After locking Griselda in her room, he’d leave—for a while, at least, if not until morning—slamming the two doors above their heads, and turning his key in the padlock.

Dare she revisit the site of so much pain?

Although she had no wish to be reminded of the darkest moments of her childhood, the strange contradiction of Griselda’s life was that the darkest times were also some of the best and brightest because Holden had inhabited those dark moments with her. Like a match light in the blackness, like hope in the midst of deep, desperate despair, he had been her only joy, and her prevailing source of comfort, strength, and spirit. She fought hard not to forget him. Even when it hurt so badly she ached and throbbed, and her regret was so overwhelming she thought it might be better to die, she still fought to remember the thousand nights in Caleb Foster’s cellar. She fought not to forget the sound of Holden’s voice, the color of his eyes, the touch of his fingers on her face, his breath against her skin. She only went on living because it was possible he was still living too.

Pulled toward the rickety storm doors, she was surprised to find the padlock and chain gone. Looking around, she found them, the chain like a rusty-colored snake, rotting in the long grass beside the cellar where she’d thrown it after picking the lock that morning three years ago.

And it told her something that the police wouldn’t have known: Holden hadn’t been locked back in. Holden and Caleb Foster had left immediately. In fact, they were probably long gone before Griselda ever even arrived in Charles Town.

She took a deep breath, trying to calm her racing heart, and pulled up one rotted wooden door, then the other. Taking a quick look at the waning sun, dread weighing down her movements, she slowly descended the stairs.

As she reached the bottom step, Griselda took in a deep breath, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light filtering in from the open doors behind her. It smelled achingly familiar, like mildew and earth, and she swallowed the lump in her throat as she stepped forward into the small, low-ceilinged room. Her foot knocked into something that clattered a short way across the packed dirt floor, and, realizing it was Holden’s tin porridge bowl, a small sob-like sound rose from deep in her throat. She leaned down and picked it up, fingering the edges, holding it against her chest like a talisman.

To her left stood the old iron cot with the thin brown-striped mattress where Holden had slept. Stepping gingerly across the room, still clutching the bowl, she stood beside it as tears streamed down her face. She pulled the bed away from the wall just a little, and there, scratched into the wall so lightly that the Man would never notice, were the letters H+G.

***

“Holden, tell me about your mama and daddy,” she whispered into the stark, cold silence.

Though she could feel his chest push lightly into hers, his every breath warming her neck every five seconds or so, she couldn’t see a thing. It was blacker than black at night, a darkness so consuming and pitch you might think the whole world had disappeared.

They were both very tired after a long day of gardening with the Man’s beady eyes watching their every move. They’d learned quickly that if Holden’s arm should brush Griselda’s, or her gaze should linger on Holden for too long, it meant a beating. Depending on the Man’s mood, one that could knock you out for hours, or just leave you in a world of pain for the rest of the day. The first time, it had taken weeks for Holden’s bruised ribs to heal. And Griselda still bore the mark on her chin where the man had split her face open a few days later. It hadn’t healed very pretty. When she ran her fingers over it, she could feel the uneven, bumpy scar that she’d probably have forever.

Griselda concentrated on Holden’s breathing, on the warm, comforting pressure of his arm slung over her hip. Her eyes were heavy, and it was warmer with Holden than it was in her own bed, but she knew better than to succumb to exhaustion and fall asleep together. If that ever happened, the Man would surely kill them.

Holden’s breath caught. “D-d-did you hear that?”

Griselda stopped breathing, and her whole body tensed, ready to roll off Holden’s bed to the floor and crawl a short way to the paneled wall that separated their rooms. Two months into their captivity, Holden had discovered a loose panel in the wall, and Griselda had become adept at rolling, crawling, pushing aside the loose panel without a peep, and returning to her room. So far, the Man had never discovered them together, and it had been their saving grace over the past two years to find comfort holding each other every night before bed.

She heard a low whimper on the other side of the door at the top of the stairs.

“Cutter,” whispered Griselda, listening for the sound of his claws clicking back across the floor upstairs. Once they heard them receding, they both exhaled in relief. It wasn’t the Man, about to come downstairs to administer “lessons.”

Holden squeezed Griselda closer to him and took a deep breath before saying the words softly, the same words he said every night. “M-m-my mother’s name was C-Cordelia, but my father called her C-Cory.”

“And your daddy . . .”

“. . . w-w-was named Will.”

“Cory and Will Croft.”

“Th-that’s right.”

“And one day, I’ll be Griselda Croft,” she said, moving on quickly because she heard the tears in his voice.

“Yep. You and me. W-w-we got to stay together.”

“Holden,” she said, shifting her body on the lumpy, dirty mattress to face him. She couldn’t see him, but she felt his breath against her lips. “When you take your time, you don’t stutter so bad.”

“S-s-stammer,” he corrected her for the thousandth time.

She tucked her head under his chin, snuggling a little closer, as he adjusted the arm draped over her waist, his fingers curling under her body as her chest pushed up against his. Resting her forehead in the curve of his neck, she closed her eyes for a moment and breathed in deeply, bypassing the smells of dirt and mildew, and finding Holden—warm skin and sweet boy and sunshine. She’d turned twelve a month ago, and she knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that she wanted that smell to whisk her to sleep every night for the rest of her life. Someday they wouldn’t have to say goodnight and part. Someday Holden would belong to her, in every possible way.

“Holden?”

“Y-y-yeah, Gris?”

“I’ll figure out a way. I promise you I will. It’ll be summer in a few more months, and I’ll figure out a way to get us out of here.”

“I know you will,” he said, but his voice was defeated.

“Don’t give up, Holden.”

“I won’t.” His fingers slipped out from under her as his lips pressed against her hair for several long minutes. “N-n-now, go to bed, Gris. D-d-don’t fall as-sleep here.”

She clenched her jaw, and her eyes burned with almost unbearable sorrow, the same way they did every night at this dreaded moment.

“Keep your fingers over the letters,” she said softly, pulling away from the warmth of his body, glad that the darkness hid her weak tears.

“I will,” he said, turning toward the wall, and though it was so dark she couldn’t see her own hand, she knew the exact spot he was touching as he fell asleep.

She moved soundlessly through the panel and climbed into her own bed on the other side of the wall, pressing her fingers to the identical, carefully carved letters until she finally fell asleep.

***

Tears covered Griselda’s face as she backed away from the little bed, the power of her memories making her head pound and swim at the same time. The yawning grief she felt every day from Holden’s loss was almost paralyzing in its intensity here, where they’d spent so much time together. She turned to face the room and noticed the man’s tools still neatly hanging on pegs over his tool bench. It occurred to her that she could pick up any one of those tools—a hammer, a screwdriver, a saw, anything—and end her pitiful sixteen-year-old life right now.

It was tempting to die here, where she’d experienced the best and worst moments of her life. Chances were good that Holden was already dead, and that meant if she killed herself, she’d be reunited with him. She stepped toward the workbench, but her own words stopped her.

Don’t give up, Holden.

The whisper ricocheted through the dead, quiet space like she’d said them aloud.

I won’t.

Still clutching Holden’s bowl, she turned sharply away from the tools and ascended the concrete steps into the twilight of early evening. She shut the cellar doors with a loud thump, then turned her back on the dark, dingy space where she’d been imprisoned until the day she made it across the Shenandoah alone.

As the sun set, she made her way back up to Charles Town on foot, arriving long after dark and checking into a motel that would accept cash up front from a teenager.

Weary and hopeless, she drew a bath, stripped, and stepped into it.

That was when the unavoidable truth assaulted her: Holden was gone.

Three years ago, they’d told her he was gone, but she’d never really believed it. It was almost like she was sure Holden was hiding somewhere in that horror show of a cellar and the moment she appeared, he’d reveal himself, gray eyes soft with relief and love, opening his arms to her and burying his lips in her amber hair.

But now she’d seen the abandoned farm with her own eyes. He was gone, whisked into the night with a monster for company, and Griselda wept there in the motel bathtub, wondering whether he was dead or alive, if he was still scrappy, if he still stammered, if he ever thought of her, and if he hated her for abandoning him. Her heart clutched and wheezed and begged for death at the thought of his hate for her, but she had already made the decision to live.

Her strength was sapped. Her spirit was shattered. Her hope was gone. But she’d told him not to give up. She’d demanded that he not give up. And until she knew—with her eyes and her ears and her heart and her soul—that he was dead and gone from this earth, she had no choice. She wouldn’t give up either. Whatever strength, spirit, or hope was left in her wasted body belonged to Holden. There was nothing left, even, for herself.

The pain and emptiness had been so profound, in fact, that she knew living was the best punishment of all. To live aching and broken was exactly what she deserved. She had promised to save him, and the only person she’d saved was herself.

Shawn’s SUV went over a bump, and Griselda gasped, jolted from her memories, then shivered as desperation lingered.

“Too much wind, honey?” asked Tina, offering a kind smile and asking Jonah to turn up the music.

“It’s fine,” Griselda said, blinking her tears away before turning her glance back to the window.

They were almost at Harpers Ferry now, and from there it would be a quick thirty-minute drive south to the cabin they were renting on the river. She’d checked a map, and from the cabin, it was less than twenty minutes to Caleb Foster’s farm. The place that her body had escaped. The place where she’d left her heart in darkness with a gray-eyed, sweet-smelling boy.