Chapter 5: The Water

I looked at Dillon's hand on my door.

"Thrown away what?"

"I don't know. She wouldn't say. She just kept saying she could do better."

"And you decided to be better."

He flinched.

"I was twenty-two and stupid, Freja. I've been sorry every day for five years."

"You're five years late and twelve days from mating my sister. Sorry doesn't cover the distance."

"I'm trying to help you."

"Then stop telling me secrets on my doorstep at midnight. Tell them to your mother."

I shut the door on him.

When I turned around, Wylie was sitting up in the bed by the fire with the blanket around his waist.

"So that's the weak chin."

"Go to sleep."

"It's not that weak. I was expecting worse." He tilted his head. "He still looks at you."

"He looks at everybody. He's sorry. It's his whole personality."

"I don't like it."

"You don't get a vote."

"I've been sitting in a chair for five years," he said. "I'm voting on everything now."

I climbed the ladder so he wouldn't see my face.

I lay in the loft a long time, listening to the fire.

Tilly had thrown something away in the hedge garden that week.

Wylie had lost a night somewhere down that same hill that week.

I didn't like those two things sitting next to each other.

I didn't know what to do with them yet, so I left them there.

Arlene's truck came up the hill the next morning with its horn going the whole way.

Arlene Gage was fifty-eight, five foot nothing, with a gray crew cut and a flannel shirt older than me.

She'd raised Wylie since he was nine.

She'd been feeding me since the day I walked into Hollow Pine with my boots worn through.

She climbed out of the cab swearing about the switchbacks.

Then she saw Wylie standing in the cottage door.

He raised a hand.

"Hey, Aunt Arlene."

She stopped in the middle of the yard.

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