I don’t want to think about Seth’s theory. How Gen might have been there that night.
Gen has no money, at least. So there’d be no way that part of the puzzle could be connected to her.
But what if it’s not about the money, and Seth’s theory that someone was trying to kill me is the right one?
Could Gen really hate me that much?
Jeremy and Gen. Her hand on his arm at the wake. Him looking for her at at the movie night in the park.
What are they doing together?
Seventy-three, seventy-nine, eighty-three—
A car flies by, going too fast, making me jump.
I don’t really think someone’s about to come along and hit me with their car. But I miss the days when I used to run along the trails in the woods. The path I liked best goes along the border between the Montgomery property and the state park, past the abandoned tree house Fiona and I used to play in with the Montgomerys, then winds out to the park before you hit the Bier property. It’s grassy, but the middle is worn down enough that it’s mostly dirt, easy to run on.
I told Dad and Davy I wouldn’t go there anymore.
But it’s broad daylight. And suddenly, that’s where I want to be. It was my place to run with only the trees watching me. I want it back.
One fifty-seven, one sixty-three, one sixty-seven—
I look over my shoulder. No one on the road. Then I stop midstride, turn, and head back toward the woods.
There’s no one around when I slip in between the trees. Soon they’re all around me, reaching into the sky, reducing it to little spots of blue between leaves. The dirt path is more overgrown than the last time I was here, over a year ago. I wonder, with a pang, if the old tree house is even still there or if it’s collapsed, swallowed up by the woods.
My eyes flicker downward when I pass the log with Jeremy’s and my initials on it. He carved them there last summer, before everything fell apart.
Why are you doing that?
I want to immortalize us in a place we like to go.
I push the memory away. I don’t need to be thinking about Jeremy right now.
Four forty-three, four forty-nine, four fifty-seven—
It can get so green back here in the summer, it hurts your eyes. It’s like that now, every shade crowding around me, blotting out the still-blue sky. Crickets and birds chirp; the wind blows through the trees. The day is starting to take on that golden syrupy quality I love. Maybe it’s the way it makes everything softer and prettier; maybe it’s how this time of day makes me feel like I’m a little kid again, before everything went so horribly wrong.
Jeremy likes this time of day, too. Not like Seth, who always comes out at twilight. I remember one day with the light like this, lying in the grass in my backyard, Jeremy talking about our future…And we’re gonna have this big farmhouse with a huge yard, and we’ll have chickens and goats and maybe a horse—
Me, laughing at him. Do you know how much work it is to have a horse?
I don’t care. I want space. A big house. Land. So I can feel like even the sky is mine.
Jeremy. His face crumpling when the truth of Seth and me finally got through to him. When he realized I was telling him about Seth not to ask for forgiveness, but because I wanted him and me to be over. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d asked Jeremy to stay. But I didn’t. I didn’t want him to. I knew I didn’t deserve him.
Five oh three, five oh nine, five twenty-one—
And now he’s back to hanging out with Gen.
Is it possible that what I did changed him, changed Gen, in some fundamental way? That the best friends I had are gone, just like that, and new people have taken their place? That I really, truly don’t know either of them anymore? Do people change that fast, that drastically?
I did, when Fiona died. That knock on my door, my dad’s face ashen, the officer behind him. The moment his words sank into my brain. There was before-Addie and there’s after-Addie. The one who had hope that she and her sister would become close again, and the one who knows that hope is dead forever. They’re two different people. I know that.
But Gen losing me, Jeremy losing me, wasn’t the same as me losing Fiona. Wasn’t as final.
Unless they didn’t see it that way.
The day is still hot, but the sweat on my neck feels clammy. There’s a break in the foliage ahead. When I reach the tree house, I stop.
It was built far up in a hulking old maple, only accessible because of the little wooden boards nailed into the trunk decades before we were born. Most of it was too unstable to play in, rotting and cracked wood, but that never stopped us. Fiona and I found it first and used to leave messages for each other here. Then one day we arrived to find the Montgomerys here, playing pirate ship. That was our first turf war with them. It would not be our last. Fiona and I always lost because they were bigger and there were more of them. But we never went down without a fight.
During the school year, we brought our other friends here, too. The day after Jeremy’s dad died, Jeremy and Gen and I spent an entire afternoon up on the lower platform, the only solid one, having a long conversation about life and death and God and heaven and hell. I remember concluding that none of us believed in the “cloud castles with angels playing harps” version of heaven we were taught, but all of us hoped that there was some version that existed somewhere.
As I got older, I effectively rejected even that. Then when Fiona died, I started praying again. Please be somewhere. Please don’t be gone. Please.
I gaze up at the tree house now, wondering if that lower platform would even hold us now.
I grab on to Fiona’s necklace. I don’t want to be here anymore. I take off running.
If you go far enough, the trail eventually links up with the state park and, from there, the Appalachian Trail. You could get on it and head to Maine or Georgia, depending on which way you turn, run and run until your legs gave out, until you’ve left Bier’s End far behind.
I’ve been pounding along for less than five minutes when I round a sharp bend—and almost run smack into someone coming the other way.
“Whoa!”
I dodge to avoid them, then promptly trip on a tree root and fall, hard, onto the ground. My palms are stinging, and my elbow’s hit the edge of a log. I brush off the bits of dirt and wood. It’s bleeding but not that bad.