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The thought of her being any man’s prey—any man but me—that is, just didn’t sit right. I grabbed the invite and my wallet and found myself outside Ruby’s door, lightly tapping my knuckles on the wooden surface.
“Come in.” Her quiet voice sounded distant.
I walked in and found her sitting cross-legged on the bed. Pieces of paper were scattered all over the comforter.
“Hey, is everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I lifted the invite. “I just wanted to see if you wanted to go with me, Harp, and Grandad to Wyatt’s wedding. I mean…drive together.”
The corners of her mouth curled. “Sure. Yeah.”
Relief, I had no right feeling, engulfed me.
I exhaled. “Okay, good. Well, um, good night.”
“Good night. Be safe.”
She said that every night she saw me before I left. I knew I shouldn’t read too much into it, but it made me feel… it made me feel loved and cared for. Which was a stretch. I knew that.
As I turned to leave, I glanced down at her bed and noticed the drawings on the white sheets. I picked one up and saw that it was a penguin sitting in a tree, eating bamboo. It was adorable.
I took a step forward. “What’s all this?”
“Oh, it’s just…” She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”
“Did you draw this?”
“Yeah, I um…when I was in middle school, I decided to write a children’s book. I totally forgot about it, but when I was at the diner, my mom said that after Randy moved out, she found an old box of mine that she thought I’d want.”
“You drew these?” I had read countless books to Harper, and these illustrations were just as good, if not better, than anything she had.
“Yeah.”
“It’s about a penguin?” I reached down and picked up more papers. It was clear that the penguin was the main character of the book.
“Yes, Panda the penguin.”
“Panda the penguin,” I repeated.
“Panda accidentally gets loaded onto a cargo ship in Antarctica and ends up in China when she is a chick. When they lower her crate onto the dock, it opens, and she waddles out and wanders into the mountains, where she meets a panda family that takes her in. She grows up thinking she’s a panda because she is colored the same as them, but she never feels like she fits in. She doesn’t like bamboo, and she can’t climb trees. The climate is too hot for her, and she is sweating all the time.”
“This is really good.” I flipped through the pages. The illustrations were so well done. “So what happens to Panda?”
Ruby shrugged. “I don’t know. I never finished the book. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was writing about myself. I was Panda.”
“You were a penguin living with pandas?” I asked.
“Yep. That’s what I felt like here, in Wishing Well.”
My heart sank and broke at her statement. I’d always known that she didn’t belong here. But any small flicker of hope I’d gotten that we might be able to come to some compromise, that we might have some sort of future, was completely extinguished when I saw the pictures she’d drawn.
This wasn’t the life she wanted. She was a penguin and needed to be in Antarctica, not the mountains of China, aka Wishing Well.
“Oh, um,” she said, clearing her throat. “I talked to Remi today.”
“How’s he doing?” I wondered if he’d seen the same photos Kenna had sent to Tay. Since I wasn’t on social media, I didn’t have any idea if he was or if he wasn’t part of the Wishing Well Facebook group.
“Good. He was just asking about me coming out to California and if I had a timeline.”
