Page 46

The bakery lady screams. Celeste clicks her clicker by accident. A kid yells, “GET HIM!”

Wren appears at my side, laughing so hard she has to hold onto my arm.

“He’s escalating,” she gasps.

“He’s been escalating for three years.”

“Should we arrest him?”

“He’d only escape.”

Brody swoops down from the visitor center roof and lands beside us with a thud that rattles the pie stall. He’s grinning from horn to horn.

“Look at you,” he says to me. “Out in daylight. Smiling at tourists. Who even are you?”

“Go away, Brody.”

“I’m going to tell this story at every poker night until I die.” He pounds me on the shoulder, which would knock a normal man flat, and takes off again in a gust of wind that sends Celeste’s VOLUNTEER sticker flying.

Wren is still wiping her eyes. She leans her head against my arm, right there in front of the whole town. I don’t step away. I put my hand on the back of her braid and leave it there.

She’s mine, and it’s time everyone knows it.

By two o’clock, Celeste’s clickers say eleven hundred and forty.

I find Wren at the Lookout, the way I always do. She’s standing at the rail with a crowd around her, pointing out the hawks over the valley. People are lined up for photos with the view.

The bench facing the valley has an old man on it with a cane across his knees, and he’s just sitting there, smiling at the hills.

Then I hear a small voice behind me.

“Hey. You’re the green man.”

I turn around. A little girl in a yellow raincoat is standing on the deck with her hands on her hips. She’s about five, with a gap in her front teeth and a smear of apple pie on her chin.

I know that face.

“Molly,” I say.

Her mom is a few steps behind her, smiling and a little teary. “She wanted to come and find you,” she says. “She hasn’t stopped talking about you since the creek.”

Molly marches past me to the rail. She grabs it with both hands and stands up on her tiptoes, and she looks out at the whole valley without anybody lifting her up.

“I can see EVERYTHING,” she announces.

Then she turns around and looks me up and down, very serious.

“You got me out of the water,” she says.

I crouch down so we’re eye to eye. Even crouching, I’m taller than her mom.

“I did,” I say. “You stay on the right side of the fence now?”

She nods hard. “Every time. Mom says I’m on probation.” Then she throws her arms around as much of my neck as she can reach, squeezes once, and runs back to her mother before I can do anything but kneel there on the deck like I’ve been hit by a truck.

Wren is watching me from the rail. Her eyes are shining.

I stand up slowly. I clear my throat.