SHE’S STANDING OUT on the wide veranda, staring off into the distance, maybe at her abandoned childhood home, maybe at a rabbit on the edge of the woods.
“Did you really meet David Copperfield in Seattle?”
“I left here as soon as I was old enough. Ran away to college. Not far enough I guess.”
“Listen, I don’t want to . . .”
“Why did you come back here?” Her voice is flat and full of regret. Or maybe it’s resentment. Maybe she just doesn’t like me.
“This is my home.”
She laughs at that. The sarcastic chuckle of a perturbed cheerleader.
“You left a lifetime ago, Finn. You don’t belong here. Not that there’s much here left.”
She hugs herself, shivering against the morning chill. I pull off my sweater and wrap it around her shoulders. It gets me a dagger between the eyes, but then she softens enough to shove her arms into the sleeves and stuff her hands down into the pockets.
“Thanks.”
“I’ve never fit in anywhere, Emma. Coming back here, it’s been . . .”
“Weird?”
“To say the least. I didn’t even know what I was, what we are, until a few days ago.”
That stops her. She turns to me with those olive green eyes from my dreams, as dark and deep as the sea.
“How could you not know?” Her voice finally softening, and my heart nearly breaking at the sound of it. That little lantern in my soul swells and glows warm. Little Finn hollers in triumph in his cave.
I swallow hard and feel the weight of a lifetime of confusion sitting focused on the top vertebrae of my neck, right at the base of my head. It threatens to crush me any second.
“I . . . I always thought I was crazy. My mother never told me about any of this. It’s all like some acid-trip fever dream.”
“Tell me about it. Imagine getting your first period the same night that you wake from a nightmare and find yourself out in the woods, covered with what’s left of the deer you just tore apart, not knowing whose blood is whose.”
“Jesus.”
“Aunty Siobhan tried to help with the girl stuff, but she wasn’t my mom. She had Jules to take care of. I love my grandfather, and he’s always treated me well and taken care of me, but I’ve always been . . .”
“Alone?”
Her eyes harden again and she turns back to staring at the empty cabin across the meadow.
“Whatever we were supposed to be, whatever friendship we had when we were five, it’s ancient history. You don’t belong here.”
She strips the hoodie off and drops it on the wood-plank floor and walks away, stomping down the stairs and across the grass, and she is as beautiful as anything I have ever seen.
She almost makes me believe the anger, the hurt, until she glances up once—just once—as she backs out of the drive in her white SUV. She has tears in her eyes. Those beautiful olive green eyes, as deep and as dark as the sea.