“Five years,” I say, and then answer the next thing she’s going to ask, too. “Since he was fifteen.”
“Oh,” she says, and takes a few more steps. “Oh.”
I wait, the trail widening, and come up next to her.
“That’s longer and younger than I thought,” she says.
“It’s been a while,” I say, because when did it become five years since Reid moved in with me? From the way he leaves his shoes around it feels like he’s still brand new.
There’s another silence, and this one feels a little complicated. I can see her thinking from the corner of my eye, her back straightening while she does.
“Did they kick him out?” she finally asks.
“Not technically,” I say, and she goes red in my peripheral vision, her jaw tight, and I think it’s safe to assume that Andi doesn’t like my parents, which is fair. It’s their fault that her dad and Rick got outed twenty years ago, their fault that Andi’s maternal grandmother went to family court and tried to have Andi taken away from her dad because of it, their fault that the Burnley County School Board fired him from his job teaching eighth grade science for “poor performance” after fourteen years of stellar reviews.
Of course, it’s my fault that my parents knew at all.
“He had a rough time when he was younger,” I say, my eyes on the trail ahead of me. “He started getting in a lot of trouble at school. Skipping, failing classes, acting out, mouthing off at home. I think they caught him drinking a couple times. Their solution was to be extra-strict.”
I pull the GPS out and check it, because I need something to do with my hands and also a second to think about how to phrase all this.
“My parents kept …punishing… him because he wouldn’t act the way they wanted him to,” I say. “He cut all his hair off, so they grounded him and made him go to church every day. They’d throw away all his pants and make him wear dresses, so he’d sneak out and walk to my house in jeans he stole from Jacob.”
Andi frowns, still staring straight ahead. “How far is that?” she asks, sounding like she already knows the answer.
“Eight miles, give or take. I told him to call me and I’d come get him but most of the time he couldn’t use a phone,” I say. These are memories I hate to think of: coming home after work, or in the dark, to find my baby-faced little brother sitting on my porch, looking like shit. Knowing how many times I talked him into going back, only for the pattern to repeat.
“Did they ever come looking for him?” she asks, softly, and she doesn’t need to say I think your parents are monsters for me to understand what she means.
“Once,” I say, my voice surprisingly steady. “The first time. They called to ask if I’d seen him. I convinced him to go home.” There’s a heavy silence, nothing but the sound of footsteps. “I convinced him a couple more times, after that. And then I stopped, and he stopped going back, and my parents stopped asking if he would. I don’t think he’s talked to them since then.”
I don’t tell Andi that I could have been a better brother to Reid back then. I let him live with me, got him to school, let him look how he wanted, but I also thought it was just a phase. I didn’t even know he wanted to be called Reid—at home, at least—until Sadie told me. I made him too nervous. I still wish I could go back and be someone he could tell himself.
My parents ask me about him, sometimes, in their own way. My father will say everything going all right at home? and he’ll mean does Reid still live with you. My mother will set her jaw and narrow her mouth and ask How’s everyone doing? and pretend she means my friends or my animals, but she wants to know if Reid’s changed his mind yet. I always answer the unasked questions aloud because I don’t know what else to do.
“Has he been afraid of the cat the whole time?” she asks, and she’s obviously changing the subject, and I’m grateful for it.
“Only since I got her.”
“Wait, you got her after he moved in?”
“Two years ago, maybe?” I say. “Her mother was a stray who wandered into my friend Silas’s cabin, took the place over, and had kittens. Silas still has the mom.”
“So, you’ve made a habit of adopting strays,” she says, and I sigh because no, I have not.
“One stray,” I say, the trail in front of us narrowing. Andi goes in front so she can set the pace. “Reid is not a stray, and the other two are wild animals. Which I keep telling everyone.”
“And Silas, and Javier, and Wyatt,” she says, sliding a look back over her shoulder. “That’s your freemason blood moon virgin sacrifice secret society, right?”
“It’s none of those things,” I say, even though my stomach gave a little lurch at virgin. I haven’t been perfectly honest with Andi, and it’s another thing we’re hiking toward that I’ll have to face at the bottom of the mountain. “And if anyone adopted strays, it was Silas.”
That gets a laugh out of her, at last, crystal clear and bright. I want to take her hand, stop her, kiss her here while it’s still just us. I want her to tell me that nothing I’ve just said matters.
I want to turn around and go back and keep the long tendrils of reality from wrapping themselves around us, but I know it’s a futile thing to want. Instead, we keep hiking, and I watch the swish of her braid on her back, and I wish for things I probably won’t get.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ANDI
When we finally get to the Hogswallow trailhead parking, my feet hurt, my shoulders hurt, I have half a headache, my legs feel boneless, and the only car in the parking lot is a light blue Prius that doesn’t look like it’s a Forest Service vehicle.
I realize that I’ve got no clue who was supposed to come and pick us up. I figured Gideon would take care of it, and then didn’t give it one more single thought, just… let him be the responsible one.
“Someone’s coming, right?” I ask, going for nonchalant as Gideon swings the pack from his back and stretches his arms over his head.
“They said by five,” Gideon says, unconcerned. “We’ve still got a few—oh, wait,” he says as the driver’s door to the Prius opens. A tall man in dark pants and a dark jacket gets out, and it’d be kind of ominous if he weren’t grinning in the deep blue twilight.
“The hell?” Gideon asks, and the other man shrugs.
“Really, that’s the greeting you give your rescuer?” he says. “You spend two long weeks battling the elements—"
“We were in a cabin.”
“—fighting for your lives—”
“It had a refrigerator!”
“And when I brave the long, dark journey to come get you—”
“Jesus,” Gideon mutters.
“That’s my thanks?”
I’m trying to figure out if this is one of his brothers—maybe Zach or Jacob, one of the ones in the middle, though he doesn’t look younger than Gideon—when Gideon sighs, thoroughly rolls his eyes, and then steps forward to give the other man an enormous bear hug.