I could feel his loneliness as if it were mine. And, in that moment, my own loneliness doubled . . . and then receded down to less than what it had been.

Which was when I learned that loneliness shared is loneliness halved.

He looked at me much as the dog had at first. Unblinking. Still.

“She’s not going to bite you,” Cate said, as if I were the dog.

“The rabbit. The fish,” he said. “That was good of you.”

I wanted to say, You’re my carver! You’re the one who made the beautiful bee that’s in my pocket right now! Right this minute! You’re the one who’s been watching me all this time!

But he was part of a secret that was still mine to keep. It would have been wrong to blurt it out, especially when it was his secret, too.

“The dog caught the rabbit,” I said. “And a slug caught the fish.”

He seemed to like that. He lifted his head up and let his shoulders settle down. “I brought her some food and did some chores a few days ago. I would have come back sooner if I’d known she was sick.”

Cate reached for his hand and gave it a little shake. “This one sneaks up to see me whenever he can.”

I wondered about the sneaks. And about the up, too. Up from where?

Cate closed her eyes. “Not from the town side of the mountain,” she said, as if she had read my mind. “From the other side.”

The side that led nowhere except to more mountains and valleys and forest.

“You new people aren’t the only ones who live on this mountain,” Cate said.

Which I had always known but hadn’t really believed: that there were people here who chose to keep their distance from us, though we were harmless. Although, come to think of it, a person might say that we had kept our distance, too.

And a person might not know we were harmless.

Except this one did. This boy who had been leaving me gifts for such a long time.

Surely he knew that I was a girl he could trust.

But if that were true, why had he never come closer? Why had he not just come straight up to me, this lonely boy who could make a knife sing? Why had he not just said, “Hello. My name is Larkin. I live on the other side of the mountain.”

And that would have been that.

I turned to Cate. “I figured there were others, somewhere else. But nobody comes down past us to get to the river,” I said. “Or to get to the road into town. We’d know if they did.”

Cate frowned. “There’s more than one way down a mountain, or up one, for that matter. More than one way across a river. More than one road into town. And more than one town, too.”