“How do you know that?” I asked.

Larkin shrugged. “I know a lot about what happens on this mountain.”

I remembered, then, some fuss about Mrs. Lockhart having a stone in her belly. Having it cut out. I remember wondering how it got in there in the first place.

“So one person thinks she’s a witch,” I said. “That’s enough for you to think bad things about people from town?”

He shrugged. “They tend to take things that don’t belong to them.”

As before, I was glad he’d said they and not you. But not very glad.

“What things?”

“Mountains,” he said.

I thought back to how we’d come up from town. How we’d built our cabin. “My mother and father spent the last money they had to buy our land,” I said.

He sighed. “I’m not talking about you.”

“Sounds like you are.”

“No, I’m not. I’m talking about people who decide they own something just so they can sell it.”

And I remembered having a similar conversation with my father.

And how I’d had a similar thought: A mountain didn’t seem like something that could be owned.

But I had said our land. Just now, I had said that. And I had meant it.

And I’d stood just outside Cate’s cabin, in the clearing, and named it Star Peak. And named the mountain Ellie’s Mountain. Though not just Ellie’s Mountain.

If I had felt tangled before, I felt even more tangled now.

I opened my mouth to sputter something, I don’t know what, when he said, “It’s all right. I don’t think of you that way.”

I looked at his face and was torn between hating how his poor eye looked and loving the colors that bloomed around it.

“Then why didn’t you just come right out in the open?” I said.

I watched as his one good eye grew big. “What do you mean?”

“When you left those things for me to find. Why didn’t you just come to meet me?”

“What things?”

“A lamb. A dog. A cow. A chickadee. A full moon and an inchworm. A snowdrop.” I thought back. “An acorn. And a honeybee.”

He looked at the floor. Looked back at me. “And you,” he said.

Chapter Forty-One

I glanced at Cate. Led Larkin out into the clearing.

“Why did you just leave them for me like that?” I said. “Why didn’t you answer me when I called to you? Why not show yourself?”

He shrugged with just one shoulder. “I didn’t know you.”

“Then why give gifts to someone you didn’t know?” I asked. “And to a girl like me?”

He looked confused. “What’s a girl like you?”

I crossed my arms. “You just said some pretty bad things about people from town.”

He shook his head. “I could tell you weren’t like that.”

I waited.