Chapter 18: The Ladder

Sadie's POV

The first board was wet.

I knew it before my foot came down, because I could smell it.

It was cold and green, the smell of every June ninth of my life.

I stood on it.

Nothing happened.

I took another step, and another, and the planks gave a little under me, and my whole body told me to run.

Behind me four hundred people were looking at my back.

I had spent eleven years working out how to keep one boy from looking at me like this.

Now I wanted all of them to look.

At the very end of the pier I stood with my shoes in my hands.

They were shaking so hard that one slipped and hit the boards.

"Let me."

Wyatt had come down off the stage and across the lawn.

He had walked the whole length of the boards on his slow leg, and no one had stopped him.

Wyatt knelt, picked up the shoe, and set it beside the other one.

"You don't have to do this," he said. "I don't want you to do it for them."

"It isn't for them."

"Then who?"

"The girl on the ladder." I looked at the water.

"She's been hanging on to it for eleven years, and nobody ever came to get her."

He didn't say anything.

I walked to the iron ladder, the same one, rusty and slick with weed, and my knees nearly went.

"Will you take my wrist?" I asked.

"Yes."

"I'm not asking for a promise."

"I know."

He took my left wrist in his right hand, two fingers on the inside.

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