Missy had said the shack was about half a mile up the winding trail above the lake. They figured it would take about thirty minutes to get there.

The twins walked slightly ahead. Right away, they started bickering about who was the best pitcher on the Seattle Mariners. The baseball team was only three years old, and it wasn’t very good. But the boys had become instant fans. Their dream was to see a home game in person. But they’d never been to Seattle. Neither had Jess. Missy had gone there last month for her birthday. She’d come back bragging about eating at a fancy steak restaurant. And of course she’d seen a Mariners game. The twins hated hearing about that!

Soon they’d crossed over into the best part of the forest, with old trees that soared up so high it seemed they were touching the sky. Jess breathed in the spicy smell of the pines. Her ponytail swung in the chilly breeze. Her mind drifted, and the twins’ bickering voices faded. She walked with light steps, whispering the names of every tree and flower, careful not to trample any saplings or mushrooms as she stepped.

It was how Dad had taught her to be in the forest.

He’d loved it here so much. He and Mom and Jess had come up here whenever they could sneak away from the little diner they owned in Cedar. They’d camp under the trees and hike the trails. Dad would stop every minute to photograph Mom or Jess or some bird perched on a branch. He’d saved up for two years to buy his camera, and his dream had been for one of his photographs to be shown at a gallery in Seattle.

No, he’d never taken a photography class. He’d never worked anyplace other than their diner.

But you never knew.

“Anything’s possible,” Dad always said.

And the way he looked at Jess, his eyes bright with hope, she didn’t doubt it.

Maybe he’d gotten his optimism from his granddad Clive Marlowe.

Clive had come here to southern Washington State when he was just sixteen, to work as a lumberjack. Back then there were no highways or restaurants or towns in the Cascades. There were still wolves in the woods, and grizzly bears that stood ten feet tall.

But mainly there were trees — some of the most spectacular trees on Earth. The oldest ones had been here before George Washington was born, before the Mayflower sailed, when the only people here were Native Americans quietly hunting and fishing among the trees.

But that all changed in the 1800s when American settlers came. They chased away most of the native people. Lumber companies bought up the forests. They sent men like Clive in to cut down the trees. Soon enough, most of those centuries-old trees had been chopped into wood to build ships and railroads and buildings for America’s brand-new cities.

Lumberjacking was dangerous. The biggest trees weighed fifty tons, as much as a traincar. They came crashing down with so much force that the earth shook a mile away. Men were crushed by falling branches. They lost feet and hands to the blades of axes. Clive himself was almost blinded by a spray of razor-sharp wood chips.

But it wasn’t the danger that got to Clive. It was watching those big trees disappear. He grew to hate the grinding sound of saws and axes. He dreaded the moment when a tree started to fall over, how its wood would moan and creak as though it was crying out in agony.

So he quit work at the lumber company and opened a diner he named Clive’s. Folks were sure the diner would fail. But Clive didn’t listen.

And fifty years later, Clive’s Diner was still there, passed down through the proud Marlowe family like a priceless treasure. Dad had taken it over after his own dad passed. And he and Mom ran it together until Dad’s car accident two years ago.

After Dad died, Mom wasn’t so sure she wanted to stay in Cedar. She’d always dreamed of becoming a teacher, of living in a city like Seattle.

But how could she close the diner that had been in Dad’s family for generations? And how could they leave Cedar, where every crack in the sidewalk reminded them of Dad?

Sometimes it felt like Mom and Jess were as rooted here as the old trees.

Thinking about all of this made Jess feel dizzy, as if she was teetering at the edge of a cliff.

But then Sam’s voice jolted her back.

“There it is!” he cried.

Jess looked ahead.

It was the shack.

It sat there in the distance, as though it had been waiting for them.