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  He nodded.

  “You ever feel that now?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “And sometimes I feel like I’ve already stepped off the edge and hit bottom.”

  His face was full of regret, and he sounded so much older than he was.

  My phone rang. Mom. I didn’t answer it, but I knew my time with Ian was up. “I’ve got to go.”

  Ian’s smile was sad. “Thanks for the company,” he said. “I needed it.”

  And until he said it, I hadn’t realized how much I’d needed it too.

  He reached out and grabbed my hand. His was warm and calloused, and a flush fanned across my cheeks. He turned my palm up and gently opened my fingers.

  He dropped the whittled wood into my hand. It was still warm from his pocket, and I ran my thumb over the smoothed edge. He pushed my fingers closed until they were tight around the half-finished seagull.

  “So you’ll remember me,” he said. And then he was gone.

  ONE

  JENNA

  Mom dragged Pops’s memory behind her like an overpacked bag. It was late May, seven months after his death, and she still wore her grief like a shroud. It changed everything about her. Sometimes, when I was alone, I forgot he was gone. I forgot that he wasn’t at home, puttering around in his shop, or sitting on his back porch, complaining about the heat. It was weird how someone so alive could suddenly cease to exist. But when I looked at Mom, I couldn’t forget. His death was etched in the stoop of her shoulders and the lines at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes, which used to be full of laughter, were empty.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t love Pops, or that I didn’t miss him. I loved him to the moon and back, which was what we always said when I was little and would crawl up in his lap. And I missed the hell out of him. I’d always thought that those I loved were invincible, immune. I took his life for granted, thinking we had all this time, but I was wrong. Which was why I wasn’t planning on wasting any more of it.

  While Pops’s body was in the Solitude Cemetery, his spirit was very much in our house. I didn’t believe in the kind of ghosts that rattled chains and appeared out of thin air, but I knew that memories could haunt. Pops wasn’t ever really going to be gone because he’d left so much of himself behind.

  I was being hard on my mom, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. And maybe I felt a little guilty. I wasn’t with Pops when he’d taken his last breath. I didn’t get to say good-bye. It was a decision I couldn’t take back, a mistake that would haunt me for the rest of my life. But I couldn’t change it; I could only try to move on. Surely that wouldn’t be so impossible.

  It was late when Mom came home from work, but I’d come to expect that. She had her back to me as I walked into the kitchen—heels, pencil skirt, responsible blazer. Mom had mastered camouflage. But she was chugging something out of her plastic glass, and I knew it wasn’t milk.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She jumped at my voice, then set her cup in the sink and turned around, throwing me a forced smile. She tried to pretend she wasn’t falling apart, but by the time she got home, the paint was beginning to peel. “Hey!”

  “You hungry?” I asked. I opened the fridge and started pulling out leftovers.

  “I grabbed something on the way home,” she told me. I wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth or not, but I shoved everything back in the fridge. “Becca got off okay?” she asked.

  “As far as I know.” Becca was off touring Europe with some rogue aunt. She’d left this morning, the first day of summer vacation. I was trying not to be bitter about the fact that I was stuck in Solitude.

  Mom made a small noise, like a wounded animal in a trap, and I closed the refrigerator door and looked at her. She was crying. Again.

  I hated myself for being aggravated with her. What kind of horrible person was I? But I couldn’t stand it when Mom cried, and she had cried every single day for the past seven months. I missed Pops more than anything, but crying every day wasn’t ever going to bring him back, and I didn’t see the point. She needed to pull herself together.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, although I didn’t have to.

  “I sold the house.”

  “Pops’s house?” I asked. Mom flinched. “When?”

  “Last week.”

  She’d sold the house. I didn’t think she was ever going to. If we hadn’t needed the money, I guess she wouldn’t have. It would’ve just sat out there, lonely and empty, until it rotted to the ground. I tried sketching out a possible tenant, but it was weird imagining someone else in Pops’s house.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t feel like talking about it. But they’re moving in this week, so…” Her voice trailed off as she turned her back to me and stared out the window into the dark. “I’m an orphan,” she said.

  I stepped closer and put my hand on her shoulder. It was shaking. “Mom, you’re thirty-five years old. And you still have Mops. You’re not an orphan.”

  “But it feels like I am,” she argued.

  “I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Ignore me,” she said, but she didn’t really mean it. “I’m just tired. I’m going to bed.”

  She slunk into the shadowed living room, and I listened for the click of her bedroom door.

  I needed out of the house. I put on my running shoes and slipped into the dark.

  I ran out to the train yard. I couldn’t see more than a couple of steps in front of me, and I had to be careful not to trip over the abandoned tracks. Chains clanked somewhere in the distance, the ghost of a memory, of a time when Solitude was a place people came to instead of one they tried to leave. Back when the trains ran. Nothing ran here anymore. Just me, fueled by escape.

  I’d always wanted to ride on a train. Pops had been full of stories about the railroad, and when he’d told them, I’d heard the metal heartbeat and shrill whistle, sounds that promised adventure or, at the very least, a change in scenery. But now the only thing that blew across the open space was emptiness, trailed by a stifling breeze that couldn’t even dry the sweat covering my skin.

  God, I loved running at night. I loved the quietness of it, loved the cocoon it wrapped around me, loved that it was a two-way mirror, a way for me to view the world without being seen. That was one reason I always waited until dark to go running. That, and to escape the heat. To escape my mother. Sometimes I thought if I ran fast enough, I could escape everything, could step out of my own skin as easily as shrugging off a sweater. It hadn’t happened yet, but it might. I was getting faster.

  I let my legs lead. That was another thing I loved about running—autopilot. There were several glorious minutes when I wasn’t thinking at all before I realized I was running a well-worn path out toward Pops’s. I hadn’t used the trail in a while. The paved road was the long way around. I had blazed a shortcut long ago, cutting the ten-mile drive to three on foot.

  I stepped out of the trees at the back edge of the property and was surprised to see a single light on in an upstairs window. A shadow crossed briefly in front, and there was an odd tug in my chest. I wondered how long it would take me to get used to someone else living in Pops’s house, strangers eating meals in the kitchen and working in his shop. I couldn’t believe a person could build an entire life, so completely inhabit a place like Pops had, and then just disappear. Did the house remember him at all?

  I stopped at the edge of the pond. Pops had all sorts of stories about this pond, like the catfish that swallowed his best hunting dog. He’d scared me with that one for years, until I was finally old enough to figure out he was pulling my leg. But the stories I liked best were the ones we’d written ourselves. Like the time Mops had fallen in headfirst trying to reel in a fish. She’d lost her balance and tumbled over into the water. She’d jumped up, sputtering and fussing, and Pops had laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. She was as mad as an old wet hen, and Pops had called her that for several weeks.

&nb
sp; But mostly I remembered the quiet of the water lapping against the shore and the sweet smell of Pops’s pipe. I’d always liked it out here. It was a shame I hadn’t really appreciated it until it was no longer mine to enjoy.

  The light in the window cut off, leaving me with nothing else to focus on other than memories and a small rock on the edge of the pond. There was a tiny silver-colored vein running through it, and if I eyed it at just the right angle, it looked like a heart. I scooped it up and held it tightly in my fist as I turned around and headed home. I didn’t want to get caught trespassing. It made me sad knowing I was no longer welcome on the land where I’d grown up. Such an inconsequential thing, but in a small town, the slightest disruption from normalcy could seem like a cataclysmic shift.

  Mom was asleep on the couch when I got home, her knees curled to her chest, her hands tucked underneath her chin. Her red tumbler sat next to an empty bottle of wine, and she had washed away her ruined mascara. She looked like a kid. I pulled the blanket off the recliner and covered her up, kissing her on the forehead like she had when she’d put me to bed when I was small. It was much easier to love my mother when she was asleep.

  I awoke the next morning to Shakespeare: Bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible. I stretched and let my eyes trace the words over and over again. I had sixty-seven quotes painted on my ceiling, all intended to inspire me to greatness in every aspect of my life. But mostly I waded around in mediocrity, thinking I’d found my way forward only to discover I’d circled back to where I’d started.

  Mom was in the kitchen when I got there, still nursing her coffee. She was usually at work by now. “Get dressed,” she said.

  “Good morning to you, too.” I looked down at my shorts and T-shirt. “I am dressed.”

  “In something that doesn’t look like you fished it out of the trash.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re taking this to Mrs. McAlister.” She pointed to a huge basket that was taking up most of the counter. There was a bottle of wine in it, as well as fruit and nuts. I couldn’t see everything because there was an enormous pink and black polka-dotted bow covering most of it.

  “Who?”

  “Ruth McAlister.” Mom took a deep breath. “She’s the one who bought the house.”

  “So why do we have to go over there?” I asked.

  “You. You’re going over there. I can’t.”

  I glared at her. I was not volunteering for the mission. I really didn’t want to see other people’s things in Pops’s house. “No.”

  Mom sighed. She’d never had much patience. “It’s the polite thing to do. To welcome them to town and thank them for doing business with me.” Mom was a real estate agent. She gave me a guilty look. “And to pick up the rest of the boxes. We need to get them out of their way.”

  “Shouldn’t we have done that before they moved in?” I asked.

  “They were sort of in a hurry. And I wasn’t ready.”

  She still wasn’t.

  I poured myself a bowl of cereal and curled up in the overstuffed chair in the corner. It was my favorite place in the house, aside from my room. Sunlight streamed over my shoulders. “Well I can’t,” I told her around a mouthful of cereal. “I’m working today. Besides, that’s your job, not mine.”

  Mom had perfected the eye of judgment. “You’re going,” she said, “because I said so. Besides, I already called Mops and told her you’d be late.” Mom’s voice was tight. It always was when she talked about her mother. “She was fine with it.”

  Sometimes having my grandma as my boss sucked.

  “Anyway,” Mom was still talking, “I think Mrs. McAlister has a son just your age.”

  As if that was going to make everything about this okay. I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t understand why Mom wanted me all fixed up with a boyfriend. When she was my age, she’d dated the hottest guy in school, and that hadn’t worked out so well for her. I was focused on getting an academic scholarship out of here, shaving a minute off my 5K time, and finally seeing all the places I’d only ever read about. “He’s going to be a senior,” Mom said, “and he’s new in town and doesn’t know anyone. You’re going, and you’re going to be nice.”

  “Fine.” But I wasn’t changing clothes.

  * * *

  I had to admit, I was a little curious as to just who in the world had decided that Solitude would be a good place to live. It was too small to be on a map. But Solitude was safe. People rarely locked their doors. The most dangerous thing that ever happened here was when ancient Mrs. Pettigo decided to drive herself to the store instead of waiting on her elderly son. And since old Mrs. Pettigo couldn’t see a damn thing, anyone within a quarter mile of her and her moving vehicle was likely to lose a limb.

  Pops’s place was between Solitude and Middleton and in the middle of exactly nowhere; I had to turn off the paved road long before I wanted to. There was nothing but woods that far out, the houses spaced apart enough that they couldn’t be considered neighbors. The stretches between them were filled with trees, broken occasionally by open fields. I knew every tree, every curve in the road. And even though it had been seven months since I’d driven out that way, it was like returning home after a long trip—not that I would know anything about that. But I imagined it was something like this, a tugging on the heart in two different directions, and I couldn’t blame my mom for refusing to come. She had way more memories tied up in this place than I ever could.

  The driveway was overgrown, testifying to Pops’s absence, but I couldn’t have passed it if I tried—the Bronco slowed automatically. It had been Pops’s before it became mine, his fishing rig that usually sat underneath the metal canopy attached to the side of the workshop. The shiny truck parked there instead was an imposter.

  The house gave me a reproachful look as I pulled up in front and hopped out, the yard full of tangled bushes and brown spots. I grabbed the welcome basket, which had gained at least five pounds on the ride over. I labored up the steps and tried to shuffle it a bit, but there was no way I was going to be able to hold that thing with one arm. I kicked the door instead of knocking.

  Footsteps echoed through the house, and for a split second, I half-expected Pops to answer, grumbling about having to get up to get the door. I turned sideways just as the door opened. It wasn’t Pops, but I would be lying if I said those blue eyes weren’t familiar.

  TWO

  IAN

  Legs. That’s all I saw when I wrenched open the old door. Long, lean, muscled legs. Beautiful. Then the girl turned.

  I pried my eyes away from her tanned legs. Her eyes were green with gold flecks. I hadn’t ever seen anything like them. Her hair was brown, but with red that somehow managed to catch the sunlight even though she was standing in the shade of the porch. She gave me a blinding smile that I somehow felt I didn’t deserve.

  “Ian, who is it?” Mom shouted from somewhere inside.

  “Um.” I hadn’t even asked.

  The girl’s smile faded and then disappeared completely. “Jenna,” she said, her voice hoarse.

  Mom walked up behind me then, wiping her hands on her shorts. Her smile was plastered on like some overdone Halloween mask. Jenna didn’t seem to notice.

  “My mom, Vivian Oliver, sent this over. To welcome you to Solitude.”

  “Please, come in,” Mom said, stepping out of the way. She pinched my arm hard.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, feeling stupid. “Let me.” I grabbed the basket from her—it was ridiculously heavy—and followed Mom into the kitchen.

  “Excuse the mess,” Mom said, “we’re still unpacking.”

  I set the basket on the counter. Jenna looked around the kitchen, her eyes a little sad. She smiled politely at my mom. It was hard to get my brain to focus. I just kept staring like an idiot.

  “I also need to get the boxes my mom left,” Jenna said.

  Mom nodded. “They’re in the dining room. Ian will help you carry them out to your car. I should finis
h unpacking.” Mom threw me a warning look out of the corner of her eye, which was unnecessary. I knew the rules—she reminded me often enough.

  “So what’s in the boxes?” I asked, picking one up and carrying it out to her car.

  She opened the back. “My grandpa’s stuff. He died in October.” I couldn’t read the look she gave me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  We grabbed more boxes from the house, piling them into her Bronco. There weren’t many, but my shirt soon stuck to my back.

  “So,” I asked, “how long have you lived in Solitude?”

  “All my life.” She sighed.

  I couldn’t imagine staying in one place for so long.

  After we filled her backseat, we headed back inside to double-check that we’d gotten everything.

  “You really don’t remember me?” Jenna asked.

  “Should I?” I spoke before I thought. Of course I should. She was just going to be one of the many things I was supposed to remember but didn’t. But I couldn’t understand how this beautiful girl could tumble into the dark holes of my memory.

  “No,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “I don’t guess you should.”

  I heard Luke rattling around in his room. Typical. He’d holed up in there as soon as we got here, but let a pretty girl stop by, and he was suddenly ready to make an appearance. He was always ruining things. But Mom had made it very clear that I was supposed to try to keep him out of trouble. It was going to be a full-time job.

  “Um, I’d better get back to work. I have a lot left to unpack,” I said.

  “Of course.” Jenna’s voice was hard. “I’m sorry I just showed up. My mom,” she said, as if that were all the explanation I needed.

  “It was nice to meet you.” I hurried out of the room. Mom eyed me as I passed by—she must have heard Luke too.

  Jenna said something in return, but I was already halfway up the stairs. Not a good impression at all. It was all Luke’s fault. Most things were.