Page 90 of The Hard Way

“Get away.”

He put his arms around me. “It’ll hurtis never a good excuse to pull back from love.”

I shook my head.

He brushed my hair aside. “We’ll turn around if you want.”

I shook my head some more, and once my throat was unclogged enough to talk, I said, “I want to see them and the farm more than anything, but I can’t.”

“We’ll be there with you.”

I couldn’t even talk.

“We’ll turn around—”

I shook my head through my tears. Zeus was heading up the border trail, the road that went between our pastures and the Millers’ pastures. We were so deep in now, my head spun.

The road turned to dirt and wound down to the base of the ridge…just out of sight of the ridge. Vanessa would’ve told them to do that. It’s how I would’ve gone if I’d wanted to sneak a look. Hide the cars below the ridge and climb up.

“Don’t cry, Ice. We can go back,” Odin said, but it was too late—the old place was working its magic on me. The trees, the shoots coming up in the fields, even the giant holes in the dirt road. Everything in me drank this place up.

“I’ll do it,” I said in a small, shaky voice.

We parked side by side at the base of the ridge. We used to take the sheep down here now and then, but it was a weekday, a school day—no time for an excursion. They’d let them out on the upper grazing area.

Zeus came around and opened my door. “Vanessa says they’ll be coming out at nine exactly.”

“Kaitlin should already be at school,” I said.

“She has study hall until ten. Come on—your sister said they’d only be out for a bit. There’s a fence issue.”

I smiled wistfully. “There’s always a fence issue.” Still I didn’t get out. I couldn’t.

Thor slid in. He took my hand. “Together,” he said.

“I love you,” I whispered.

He squeezed my hand and pulled me out. I let him.

We were technically on the Millers’ property, though our families had traditionally shared this as a kind of no-man’s-land road that afforded access to both fields.

We climbed the sloped side and on up to the crest. There was the fence in the near distance, and beyond it, our land, stretched out in mud brown and spring green—the grazing land framed by trees. You could see the barn in the distance, the red faded to brown, and our little white farmhouse beyond that.

A lot of things in Baylortown were somehow smaller or shabbier than I remembered, but the old pasture edge was more beautiful than ever. The far side we were looking at was shaded by old oaks and hickory trees. I used to love this side. We’d bring the sheep out here during the hottest days of summer.

A bell rang out. The dinner bell.

“That’s our sign,” Zeus said. “Come on.” He headed to the giant pine that was a few yards outside of our fence line, one of the best climbing trees with limbs like ladder rungs and enough foliage to conceal you. Almost like a giant tent, that pine.

Zeus handed me the binoculars. “Let’s do it.”

I strapped them around my neck, and we climbed.

I hadn’t been in that tree since childhood, and it made me love Vanessa even more for thinking of this as a vantage point.

We arranged ourselves on the branches that jutted out horizontally from the trunk. Zeus and Odin were on the other side from me, Thor just below. I shifted around so I could see through the pine boughs. I heard Petey the dog first.

“Shit! He’s going to smell me!”

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