Jeremy didn’t answer. He simply pointed in the general direction of Rafe’s sculpture garden.

“Okay, we knew her,” Rafe said. He couldn’t pretend otherwise. “How do you know she’s still alive?”

“Gut feeling.”

“That could be the bruised rib.”

Jeremy snorted a laugh.

“Can you answer this?” Rafe said. “Simple yes or no. The reason you can’t or won’t tell me about what happened when we were lost…Was it because I was a coward out there?”

“No.” Jeremy said that word loudly, clearly, and forcefully. Rafe stared at him. Jeremy leaned forward and met his eyes. “Jesus, Rafe, you were anything but a coward. You won’t believe me, so I don’t know why I should bother saying this, but listen to me, Rafe…You were the opposite of a coward. When we were gone, you were…heroic, courageous to a fault, nobler than any prince of this world dead, alive, or still to come. God, if anyone tried calling you a coward, that would be the last word I ever let them speak.”

Rafe didn’t speak at first, only sat silently to absorb the shock of Jeremy’s speech. Who talked like that? Nobler than any prince of this world…No one talked like that. Maybe in another world, another time. And about him? A country kid with a country mom who wore long skirts and no makeup, hair not just long but Pentecostal long? And an electrician dad who showed up to school meetings in his sweat-stained uniform shirts with his name stitched on the breast pocket? Him? A boy named Ralph Stanley from Nowhere, West Virginia.

“You’re right,” Rafe finally said. “I don’t believe you.”

“I tried.” Jeremy sat back on the sofa.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Come with us to the Crow. That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“I can’t do this without you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Let’s just say even if I could, I wouldn’t. Would you go back there without me?”

“I wouldn’t go back at all.”

“Why not? Didn’t it ever occur to you that going back there might help you remember?”

“Dad said—”

Emilie chose that perfectly imperfect moment to return to the cabin, a bottle of Tylenol in her hand. She gave a nervous smile and then passed the pills to Jeremy. He didn’t open them.

“Dad said what?” she asked. “And whose dad?”

“His dad,” Jeremy said, pointing at Rafe with his beer. “My dad’s been dead since before I was born.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. It was a car accident, right?”

“Car? Yes. Accident? No. Leaving the car running in the garage wasn’t an accident.”

Rafe smiled behind his beer as Emilie stared at Jeremy, her jaw scraping the floor.

“You asshole,” Rafe said.

“It’s true,” Jeremy said. “Not my fault the internet got it wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Don’t feel bad,” Rafe told her. “He pulls out the dead dad card whenever he wants pity.”

Jeremy, shameless, only grinned. “Hey, it works. You can get your membership card now too.”

“I don’t want it,” Rafe said. “You know, when we were lost, Dad went to the Crow every single day. Two hours before work, he was searching for us. After work, he’d be there until sundown. Long after the search-and-rescue volunteers went home, he was still there. The one thing he asked me was to never ever go back.”

Jeremy leaned forward. “You’re forgetting the part where he’s the reason we got lost in the first place.”

“What? How?” Emilie asked.

“We got into a fight the night before,” Rafe said. “Just a stupid fight. And that’s not why we got lost. You told the cops we got turned around trying to find the Goblin Falls.”

“First,” Jeremy said, ticking off on his fingers. “It wasn’t a stupid fight. He tore your sketchbooks to shreds and slapped you so hard he left a bruise on your cheek.”

“What?” Emilie sounded horrified.

“It was nothing.”

“Second, we did get lost because we were looking for the Falls, but the reason we were looking for the Falls is we were trying to miss the bus back to school on purpose so Mum would have to pick us up, and you could stay the night at my house. You didn’t want to go home. You told me you never wanted to go home.”

“I was fourteen.”

“You don’t owe your father anything,” Jeremy said. “Rafe? You know that, right?”

Rafe didn’t want to talk about this, not to anyone but especially not to Jeremy and this woman he barely knew. Still, he knew it was easier to answer and get it over with than to argue.

“Four years ago, I was out here with Dad, helping him clear some vines. Porcelain berry. Pretty, but it’s invasive.”

He remembered piling all the vines into the clearing and creating a giant glowing bonfire. He could still smell the acrid scent of the burning bushes. His dad looked haggard, more than usual.

Can’t let stuff like this take root, his father had said to him. It’ll take over the whole damn woods if you don’t get it out.

I think we got it all, Rafe said because he had to say something.

His dad was quiet before saying, It’s good to have your help out here. Sometimes, I forget I almost didn’t have a son.

I’m right here, Dad.

And the fire popped, and the acrid smoke rose, and maybe something in the air made his father brave enough to say it…

“That day, Dad said, ‘I want you to know, son, I regret the things that happened before you got lost.’ I said I appreciated that. Then he said, ‘Did you ever get around to forgiving me for that?’ ”

“What did you say?” Jeremy asked.