“I can’t take you seriously when you do that,” she said with a small laugh. She moved past me, farther into the kitchen. “Do you two need any help?”

“If you could get Alex out of the way, that would be great,” my dad answered. Then he winked. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever laughed harder in my life.

*  *  *

“It’s gorgeous,” Sarai said later as I led her through the trees behind my parents’ house. “But it’s really cold and wet out here.”

“Just a little further,” I promised.

We were nearly at my favorite place on the property. An old fort that Kate, Bram, and I had built one summer when we’d been too old to hang out inside bothering our mom and too young to go anywhere on our own.

My brother and sister remembered the old place fondly, but they didn’t seem to have the same connection to it that I did. To them, it was just a worn-down fort where we’d built fake fires and pretended that the world was at war as we hid from foreign invaders. To me, it was the place where I’d finally settled into my life with the Evans family. I’d spent hours in that tiny pocket of the property, constructing spears out of rocks and tree branches, using ferns to patch up Kate’s knees when she scraped them, and building a place where my brother could feel safe. We’d never brought other kids here. It had been an unspoken rule that the three of us had followed.

Sarai and I stepped between two trees that had begun to grow together far above our heads, and through some exceptionally wet ferns that soaked us to our knees, and then we were there.

There wasn’t much left of the fort. Some rotting boards were crudely nailed to a tree in a bad attempt at a ladder. There was an old metal lawn chair tipped on its side with the blue plastic seat mostly disintegrated. A few odds and ends that we’d pilfered from the house were scattered around.

“Neverland,” Sarai murmured, walking into the middle of our camp. She turned in a slow circle, taking it all in.

“What?” I picked up an old spoon that was half covered in dirt and absentmindedly set it on one of the ladder boards.

“I can imagine you here,” she said with a little laugh. “A little lost boy, with your fur cape and a stick taller than you in your hand.”

“More like a pair of ripped jeans and an undershirt that my mom accidentally dyed pink in the wash,” I replied, grinning. “My parents were real serious about wearing play clothes outside.”

“I love it,” she said, smiling. “This place is awesome.”