Page 5 of Lost in the Moonlight

Our nightmare was over. For six years, no one had found us here. I was living the dreams I’d promised myself I’d make come true and marking off the joyous experiences on my bucket list one at a time. The heaviness of our past had slid away.

I ducked my head through the swinging door to the café and hollered goodbye. Hector’s returned volley followed me out the door.

When I’d walked to work that morning, the fog had been thick, but now the sunshine had finally broken through, and the gentle warmth coasted over me. The quiet, damp of the predawn hours had been replaced with the noisy rush of lunchtime in a small town. The heady scent of cherry blossoms filled the air. The pink-and-white petals lined the cobblestone streets from Bonnin University to the far end of Main Street where the asphalt took over.

A fragrant petal twirled from the sky and landed on my skirt, blending in with the sheer fabric and making me feel like I was actually wearing spring. This was my favorite time of year in Cherry Bay, when the soft lights and vibrant colors shimmered over the old stone, brick, and iron buildings.

Founded in the seventeen hundreds, the town had existed in near anonymity until the college was built on the bluff overlooking the Potomac in the 1940s. Now, the charming littlehaven ballooned each fall from several thousand permanent residents to nearly ten thousand as students and academics from around the globe filtered in.

I inhaled the scent of the flowers mixing with the scent of coffee from the café and garlic from the Italian restaurant across the way before strolling toward home. I passed the yoga studio Mom and I kept swearing we were going to join and crossed the street at The Prince Darian Tavern before rounding the corner onto our street.

Here, the cheery hum of downtown disappeared, allowing another fairy-tale image to take over. Once thatched-roofed cottages faced rectangular Colonials of shiplap and warm red brick. It was like someone had drawn a line along the cobblestones and declared one side of the road belonging to the Elizabethan times and the other to the Southern gentry.

Mom and I lived in the last cottage at the end of the street where it butted up against an old cemetery. The down payment on the house had been made by the U.S. government before the mortgage had been tossed in Mom’s lap. She’d scrambled to make the payments while building a new career for herself after the Marshals had declared her old one off-limits. Giving up nursing had felt like one more loss, but now she loved teaching science at the high school.

I stopped at the iron gate in our stone wall, turning my face toward the sun, closing my eyes, and letting the rays dance over me. The song of the birds and the buzz of the bees flitting around our haphazard garden only added to the glow I felt deep inside.

When I opened my eyes, my gaze landed on the manicured yard across the street. At least the construction on the white-and-gray Colonial had finally stopped. Whoever had bought the house had all but gutted it. For six months, hammers and saws had rung out, making my daytime nap more difficult than usual.With my alarm going off at two each morning, I often needed a few hours to catch up on my sleep when I got home. It was that or I drifted off before dinner, which was the only time I got to see Mom during the school year.

As I pushed open our gate and stepped onto the river rock path, the door of the Colonial opened behind me. An old habit I’d mostly shaken had me ducking into the shadows of our willow tree where I could watch and not be seen.

A man in his late twenties emerged from the house. He was tall and lean in a way that screamed corded muscles and tight control. His wide shoulders were pulled back straighter than I’d ever seen anyone hold themselves. He had deep brown hair with just a hint of a wave that caused the edges to curl over the collar of his gray jacket. The dark locks glistened with undertones of black and silver in the sunshine.

He twirled a set of keys around a long finger, a baseball cap in his other hand, as he jogged down the brick path to the sidewalk, where he jerked to a quick stop. He looked both ways along the street before finally sending his eyes in my direction. I had a quick impression of a strong nose and square jaw before a penetrating gaze landed on the shadows of the willow tree.

While I knew he couldn’t see me, my heart still skipped a beat and I retreated farther. Something about the intensity of his look caused my pulse to thunder in my veins. It wasn’t the fight-or-flight instinct I experienced with Poco. This was…tantalizing. A quiet dare. As if he could tempt my soul right out of my body if I let him.

For several long seconds, he stayed as still as I was, a strange mirror of opposites, before sliding the baseball hat on, tossing his keys from one hand to the other, and striding toward downtown. His denim-clad legs ate up the cobblestones at a pace even my long ones would have had a hard time keeping up with.

As my pulse slowed from its frantic beat, something tickled at the back of my mind about him. It was as if I knew him, and yet I was positive we’d never met. I would have remembered that soul-luring gaze.

Was he living in the Colonial or visiting? Did he have a wife and kids who’d moved in with him, or was he staying in that big house all alone? Was he working at the college?

I stopped my runaway thoughts. It was none of my business. If there was one thing Mom and I were good at, it was respecting people’s privacy, because we needed the same in return.

I shook off the wild tumult his appearance had caused and made my way down the path to the cottage. The flowers needed watering, and the weeds needed to be pulled, but thoughts of the mosaic and my miniatures were calling to me.

I’d decided to start by printing an edible photo of the mosaic onto a layer of fondant, and then I’d stack carefully crafted miniature tarts and pies and other treats along the top until it became a three-dimensional version of the original. It would be a challenge, and I hadn’t worked all the details out yet, but anticipation had me itching to begin.

I loved working for Hector and was grateful that he’d encouraged me to attend culinary school, but these days, I found myself craving more from my career. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life only making Hector’s recipes, only creating treats gobbled up with barely a momentary glance.

I wanted to create art in the form of food.

I wanted it to be appreciated viscerally—with all your senses.

Desserts that would be remembered months after seeing and tasting them. I wanted people to tell stories about them to their friends, as if reliving a beautiful memory. A mark that would be left behind even if I no longer was here.

Chapter Three

Lincoln

I CAN BARELY SAY

Performed by The Fray

Music filled the house from thebuilt-in speakers, ranging from classical to country to pop. While the volume wasn’t loud enough to wake my actual living neighbors at two in the morning, it was enough to keep my mind occupied so I wasn’t fixated on seeing Sienna again.

Over the last two nights, I hadn’t seen a glimmer of her, and I’d almost convinced myself the upheaval of the move had simply brought her back temporarily. After dwelling on it for much too long, I wasn’t even sure it had actually been Sienna. Even as a ghost, Sienna had always been loud, demanding her presence be acknowledged, whereas the spirit the other night had simply slipped through the tombstones as if skimming through calm seas. A beacon of light rather than a black hole.

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