He gestures toward the road, and we start walking again. “My father would stay, actually. He’s found a way to help people, to have some sort of use.” He clears his throat. “I admire him. I wish I were more like him. But I don’t blame your mother. If I had the chance to run, I would take it.” He glances away. “And I would never want to be anybody’s reason for missing that chance.”
The look on his face makes my heart twitch. “Your father would fight hard to stay with you,” I say, the words suddenly spilling out from where they’ve been stuffed down and hidden for months. I can already feeling the tightness building in my throat. “But my father didn’t even try.” I choke on the words. “In some ways,” I say, picking up my pace, suddenly angry, “going off to war was easier than facing life with us.”
“I’m sorry, Aila,” Will says, reaching out a hand toward me and then pulling it back. We walk in silence for several minutes.
Just as the trees begin to clear again, we pass a massive house with a bright red door. “Who lives there?” I ask, pointing.
He glances at my finger. “Guess,” he says.
“The Pattons?”
He nods.
“Why do they have a red door when no one else does?”
“Imported it. Paid for it to be painted and brought in from another state. Most people here don’t have that kind of money to spend.”
I raise an eyebrow at him. “Your front door is gray.”
He raises one back at me. “If my father had a finishing word, it would be solidarity.”
The finishing word. I laugh, but his face suddenly flushes, and with it I remember his Christmas present. We walk the rest of the way in comfortable silence, and I wait until Will has climbed the stairs to his room before I slip into Dr. Cliffton’s library. I close the door and skim through the stacks of books for a collection of foreign language dictionaries. Pull one in particular from the shelf.
I sit down in the corner and open it. My heart starts pounding, my fingers flying faster as I flip through the pages and come upon the entries of L’s.
The word Will carved in the wooden box, the riddle he left for me to discover at Christmas. Lumoava.
It means “enchanting.”
In Finnish.
Heat burns along the bows of my rib cage. My heart takes off in a spray of paper wings that doesn’t slow until I see Will at dinner that night. Then it trips a beat and takes flight anew.
I sit down in the seat next to him, which is a mistake.
He has to ask me three times to pass the green beans before I realize that I can’t hear him anymore.
Chapter Forty-Five
I cannot hear Will Cliffton.
This is bad. My thoughts race. This is bad.
I practically throw the green beans at him as I stammer an apology that I was lost in thought. It’s convincing enough that no one suspects the truth.
I think.
And now I have to hide.
I leave the table and immediately shut myself in my room.
“Do you want to play cards?” Miles calls through the closed door.
“I’m not feeling well!” I answer.
It’s not a complete lie. My head is pounding, and my stomach is turning itself into knots over the newest riddle I have to solve.
How am I supposed to hide from Will in his own house?
