One Minute Younger Always Second Best Until I Walked Out the Door novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Cassia's Gift

Cassia held the box out in both hands.

"Everything you left at home," she said. "Colt wanted to throw it out in a fit of temper, and I said no. I thought you might want it."

I took it.

It was heavy, and the lid was tied with string.

Jonas had stopped the truck behind me.

He got out and stood by the open door and did not say a word.

Cassia looked at him once, politely, and then back at me.

"I'm so sorry about the Naming," she said. "It was my fault as much as anyone's. I planned the whole evening and I never asked you what you wanted. Colt was so nervous. He's not good at being the centre of things."

"He seemed fine to me."

"He isn't. He cried in the bathroom afterwards, Roxana."

She said it with such simple sorrow that anyone would have believed it.

I opened the box.

Inside were my old maps, folded flat and layered with tissue.

There were the practice grids I had drawn at fourteen, and the first border sheet I ever finished, and the Gravel Fork ridge map with my thumb smudge in the corner.

"You kept them well," I said.

"I'd never let anything of yours be lost."

I lifted the layers one at a time.

The south ford sheet was near the bottom.

I knew it by the little blue arrows.

I held it up to the grey light and my stomach turned.

The ford was in the wrong place.

It had been moved a quarter mile east, to the other bank.

The new line was in pencil, and the pencil was a soft one.

I draw only in 4H.

This was the grey, smeared line of a 2B, traced neatly over my original, and under the new line you could still see mine where it had been rubbed out.

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