Chapter thirty-three

seven summers earlier

I WAS OFFICIALLY LOST.

I turned in a complete circle, but all I saw around me were trees, and trees that all looked exactly the same. Any sign of the path I had taken when I’d stomped into the woods was totally gone. The trees were blocking out the light above me, and this deep in the woods, it was darker than I had realized it would be. I could feel my heart start to beat faster, and made myself close my eyes for a moment and take a deep breath, like I’d seen my father do before he had court, and once when he saw what his car looked like when my mom rammed it into the tree that came out of nowhere.

But when I opened my eyes again, nothing had changed. I was still lost, and it was now a little darker out. I hadn’t intended to go into the woods. But I’d been so mad at Warren, for cutting me out of his stupid game. And when I’d told my mother about it, she was helping Gelsey with her new ballet slippers and told me she didn’t have time to deal with me right then. So I’d headed out the door, planning on just taking my bike and going down to the lake, or maybe seeing if Lucy was around and wanted to hang out. But the more I thought about it, the unfairness of it all, the madder I got, until I’d convinced myself that all I wanted was to be alone. And at first, I’d been so busy noticing things—a huge anthill that I would have told Warren about if I’d been speaking to him, the springy moss that grew at the roots of trees, the thousands and thousands of ferns—that when I stopped and looked around, I realized I had no idea where I was. Figuring I couldn’t have gone that far, I headed toward where I was sure the road back to my house was, only to find woods, and more woods. So I’d changed direction, but that hadn’t helped, and had only served to make me more turned around. And now it was getting dark, and I was starting to feel myself panic, despite all the deep breaths I was taking. I had a ton of freedom up in Lake Phoenix, and could pretty much do what I wanted with my day, so long as I was back for dinner. And even though my mom always complained when I did this, I sometimes went for dinner at Lucy’s and forgot to call. So it could be hours before anyone realized that I was gone, that something was wrong. And it would be dark by then. And there were bears in the woods. I could feel the first hot tears start to build up behind my eyes, and blinked them away hard. I could find my way out. I just had to think rationally, and not panic.

A twig snapped behind me, and I jumped, my heart hammering harder than ever. I turned around, hoping with everything I had that it would just be a squirrel, or better yet, a butterfly, basically anything but a bear. But standing in front of me was a kid who looked around my own age. He was skinny, with scraped-up knees and shaggy brown hair. “Hey,” he said, lifting one hand in a wave.

“Hi,” I said, looking at him more closely. I didn’t recognize him, and I knew all the kids’ whose families had homes in Lake Phoenix—most of us had been coming up here since we were babies.

“Are you lost?” he asked. And though he didn’t say it mockingly, and I was, I still felt my cheeks get hot.

“No,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. “I’m just taking a walk.”

“You looked lost,” he pointed out, in the same reasonable voice. “You kept turning around.”

“Well, I’m not,” I snapped. I felt the urge to toss my hair at him. The heroine in the book I was reading tossed her hair a lot, and I’d been looking for an opportunity, even though I wasn’t quite exactly sure how to pull this off.

He shrugged. “Okay,” he said. He turned and started to walk in the other direction, and after he’d gone a few steps, I yelped, “Wait!”

I hurried to catch up with him, and he waited for me until I got there. “I’m maybe a little lost,” I confessed as I reached him. “I’m just trying to get back to Dockside. Or really, any road. I’ll be able to find my way back.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know where that is,” he said. “But I can take you back to the street my house is on, if you want. I think it’s called Hollyhock.”

I knew exactly where that was—but it was a ten-minute bike ride away from my house, and I realized just how turned around I had actually gotten. “Did you just move in?” I asked as I fell into step next to him. He was a little shorter than me, and as I looked down at him, I could see an explosion of freckles across his nose and cheeks.

“This afternoon,” he said, nodding.

“Then how do you know where you’re going?” I asked, and I could hear my voice rise a little, as I started to panic again. Were there now two of us lost in the woods? Were we going to provide the bears with multiple entrée options?

“I know the woods,” he said, in the same calm voice. “We have some behind our house in Maryland. You just have to look for markers. You can always find your way out again, no matter how lost you think you are.”

That seemed highly unlikely to me. “Really.”

He smiled at that, and I could see his front teeth were slightly crooked, the way Warren’s had been before he got his retainer. “Really,” he said. “See?” He pointed through a gap in the trees and I saw, to my amazement, the road, with cars going by.

“Oh, wow,” I said as I felt relief flood through me. “I thought I was never going to get out of here. I thought I was bear food. Thank you so much!”

“Sure,” he said, with a shrug. “It was no big deal.”

As he said this, I realized he wasn’t bragging, or telling me that he’d told me so, or being a jerk about the fact that I’d lied and then needed his help anyway. And as I looked at him, and his steady green-brown eyes, I was suddenly glad I hadn’t tried to toss my hair. “I’m Taylor, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you,” he said, smiling at me. “I’m Henry.”

Chapter thirty-four

MY DAD RETURNED FROM THE HOSPITAL THE NEXT DAY, BUT IT was clear that things weren’t going to go back to whatever normal we’d established. His doctors no longer wanted him to go unmonitored, and apparently, he was going to need help soon that we wouldn’t be able to provide. So, as a condition of being able to come home, we would now have round-the-clock home health care workers. He also wasn’t supposed to climb stairs any longer, so a bed—the kind with a remote that could raise and lower it, the kind in hospitals—had been installed in our living room, the table we never used pushed aside to make space. A wheelchair sat in the corner of the screened-in porch, like a terrible sign of things to come.