I put my palm against her heart and waited for it to beat. And beat. And beat.
She squirmed and looked up at me. And I could see it in her eyes. She knew.
“Mim read my cards for you.”
I nodded.
I felt her shrug, her skin moving against mine.
“My heart might have two billion beats left in it, or two hundred.” She sighed. “But it doesn’t matter that much. It doesn’t. I used to think that I needed to be part of a story, a big story, one with trials and villains and temptations and rewards. That’s how I would conquer it, conquer death.”
She sighed again, and nestled closer into me. “All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee’s hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight.”
I SAW THE white stag on the way home. He was standing by the apple trees, gleaming like he was made of starlight. He took one long look at me and then bounded off into the dark.
I closed my eyes and made a wish.
THE END OF the summer.
The end of this story.
I kept my promise to Poppy.
I sent for Leaf.
I mailed a letter west, to California, to a cabin in the Red Woods.
Leaf followed his own beat and listened to no one. I didn’t know if my letter would work. Part of me wished I could ask the birds to fetch him, snatch him in their claws and carry him through the sky like Andrew in The Raven War. But part of me also hoped that Leaf would just come back on his own, because I asked him to.
The coyote knew he’d returned before I did. I saw him at the edge of the forest, watching the Roman Luck path. Leaf smiled when he saw the both of us waiting for him, the coyote and me.
Later, after he’d hugged Mim and Bee Lee and let Felix introduce his girlfriend and played Follow the Screams with the twins and Peach . . . he went to her. I left them alone for a while, but in the end I had to see. I snuck over to the Gold Apple Mine, hiding in the shadows like I used to. They were there, sitting by the creek, watching the setting sun, shoulder to shoulder, blond and red.
LEAF.
“So this is how you live now?” he asked.
I felt his eyes on me, on my back, cutting through my clothes, scorching my skin.
I looked at him over my shoulder. He was leaning against the doorframe of the old Gold Apple Mine, red hair and freckles and bony limbs, watching me start a fire. I smiled, a real Poppy smile, not any of those fake smiles I’d been using for so many years.
“Yes,” I said. “I figured it out. I figured myself out.”
Leaf laughed. He laughed, deep and bright, like he’d never done before, not with me anyway.
“Prove it,” he said.
And I did.
I WAS READING by the apple trees, bare feet in the green grass, when I heard the rumble. I looked up. Black clouds rolling in.
The hayloft was the place for thunderstorms. Wink and I liked to listen to the rain beat on the roof, watch lightning buzz across the sky.
I took my time, walking over to the barn, stopping to watch the clouds, letting the thunder boom straight into my heart.
I climbed up the ladder, stuck my head through the opening, and there she was, sitting on the hay, eating strawberries from a green bowl with one hand, and turning the pages of a book with the other. She was alone. The Orphans must have been off in the woods, playing one of their Orphan games.
I opened my mouth to call out to her— And I saw the cover of the book.
A boy with a sword at his side. Standing on a hill. Facing a dark, stone castle. Grim-looking mountains in the background.
I closed my eyes.
Opened them.
I climbed back down the ladder, quiet.
I walked home.
I went straight up to the attic.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“I want to fly to France to see Mom and Alabama.”
He looked up. He didn’t smile, but his eyes crinkled at the corners. “Okay,” he said.
“And I want you to come with.”
“Okay,” he said again, just like that.
FRANCE.
I drank café au laits. I climbed castles. I walked in French moonlight along French riverbanks. I spent long afternoons with Mom and Alabama, sunshine and lavender-scented breezes and distant church bells and talking about Mom’s book.
I hadn’t said good-bye to Wink. Hadn’t written her a letter. Hadn’t called.
Silence.
I told Alabama. I told him everything. All of it. I wasn’t looking for his advice. I just wanted to share, like brothers do.
We sat in the courtyard behind our ancient stone house at the edge of Lourmarin. Mom was inside writing and Dad was at a book auction in Avignon. They went their separate ways during the day, but later . . . later we would all have a lazy al fresco dinner in the town square, and then a long walk together come twilight.