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“Your mom sent me out to help, but it looks like you’re done,” he calls.
“Perfect timing, then,” I call back as he comes up to us. “This is the last of it.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever come here and not been given a task,” he says when he reaches us. “She even asked me to clean the gutters once.”
“Did you?” Caleb asks.
“Of course I did,” Silas says. “I wouldn’t dare refuse Clarabelle Loveless.”
“I’ve done it,” I offer. “Multiple times.”
“You’re her child, she’ll forgive you,” he points out. “I’m just some extra kid who wandered in off the street.”
“You didn’t wander,” I say.
“Speaking of being taken in and cared for, thanks for rescuing June,” he says. “Your clothes are in the trunk of my car, plus my parents sent over a veggie basket from the garden in gratitude for saving her life.”
There it is. He knows.
It wasn’t a secret, I remind myself. It was perfectly chaste, above board, platonic.
I snort and grab the handles of the wheelbarrow.
“I didn’t save her life,” I say. “I made her night less miserable. She’d have survived just fine in the car.”
“Take the veggie basket anyway,” he says.
I haven’t looked at Caleb during this exchange, but I swear I can feel the look on his face: surprised, skeptical, amused, curious, and I want no part of it right now.
“You rescued June?” he asks as I lift the wheelbarrow and roll it back.
“During that thunderstorm Friday,” Silas says. “It was very heroic, to hear her tell it. She’s here too, by the way.”
It was? She is?
“You can tell the story,” I say, turning away from them with the wheelbarrow. “I’m gonna go put this on the woodpile. Be right back.”
“Tell me about the heroics,” Caleb says as I walk away, finally breathing.
There are a million thoughts clashing through my head right now, about Silas and June and betrayal and maybe getting punched in the face, about what I’m going to say to her when I get back inside, but one is loudest.
June called me heroic?I lean my forearms against the railing and look out at the driveway, a glass of iced tea in my hand, and I take a deep breath.
I’m not a people person. Given the choice, I prefer solitude. I prefer quiet. Large groups make me feel claustrophobic, like there’s no space in my head for my own thoughts when I’m constantly listening to everyone else’s. Even when it’s my own family, I feel that way after a while.
Also, I’m hiding from Rusty. I love her to death, but I need a break sometimes.
Just as I’m watching a squirrel chase another one up a tree, the front door opens. Inwardly, I brace myself.
And then June’s voice says, “There you are.”
I turn to look at her, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, hair pulled back in a dark knot against the hot late-August day.
Pretty. So pretty I forget how to speak for a moment.
“Close the door behind yourself, I don’t want anyone else finding me,” I say, and it’s the wrong thing.
“Oh, sorry,” she says, and steps back toward the door.
“I don’t mean you,” I say. “Stay.”
She shuts the door, walks over to me.
“Hiding from anyone in particular?” she asks, leaning on the railing next to me.
“Rusty,” I admit, and June laughs. “She wants me to play a fifth game of Parcheesi and I’m completely Parcheesi’d out.”
June laughs.
“Not the answer I was expecting,” she says.
“What were you expecting?”
“Well, now I don’t want to say,” she says. “I’ll just feel like an asshole.”
I glance over at her. She glances back.
“Silas,” she says.
“Ah,” I say, my voice perfectly neutral.
“He seems to believe that sisters should be locked inside a house until they’re wed, virginity intact, to a male of their brother’s choosing,” she says. “Or, I don’t know, sent to a convent or something.”
“You’re not even Catholic,” I point out.
“He’d probably send me to a Satanist nunnery if it meant I could never date again,” she says, annoyed, though it’s clearly not with me.
We’re quiet for a moment. Part of me wants to defend Silas, say he’s not that bad, that he’s just a protective older brother, but I doubt she wants to hear it.
“Though you’d think Satanist convents would just be nonstop gangbangs, since chastity is a virtue and all that, right?”
She looks over at me, contemplative, as if I might possibly have something to say about a Satanist convent.
“Yes?” I agree.
June laughs.
“I can’t say I know much about what moral values a Satanist convent might espouse,” I go on.
“Sorry,” she says. “He gets on my nerves sometimes. That’s not why I was looking for you, though.”
My pulse skips.
“You were looking for me?”
June turns, leans her back against the railing, her elbows on either side of her, and she cocks her head slightly.
“I found logging records for most of the National Forest,” she says.
