After she disconnected, she tossed her coffee dregs into the weeds and got up. But just as she started to turn back to the house, she heard an odd sound. A human sound. The sound someone makes when they trip and try to catch themselves. It came from the grove of trees that marked the north edge of the lawn where the woods began. As she turned to look, she caught the flash of an electric-yellow T-shirt disappearing into the pines.

Toby had been spying on her.

Chapter Seven

TOBY RACED THROUGH THE TREES, cutting to the left around the big stump, darting past the giant boulder, hurling himself over the trunk of the red oak that had come down in a storm last summer. Finally he reached the path that led to the cottage. Even though he was smaller than a lot of the other guys in his grade, he could run faster than any of them. Gram said his dad had been a fast runner, too.

He slowed as he reached the cottage. She was sitting on the back step smoking another cigarette and staring out into the yard the same way she’d been doing since she got here two weeks ago. It wasn’t as if she had anything to look at. The yard sloped down to a gully, and except for the tomato and pepper plants Mr. Wentzel had put in, Gram’s garden was nothing but a bunch of weeds. There were a couple of apple and pear trees behind the honey house, but they weren’t near as good as the trees in Mr. Wentzel’s cherry orchard.

The woman blew a long stream of smoke but didn’t even notice he’d come back. Maybe she thought if she didn’t look, he’d disappear, but she was the one who needed to disappear. He wished Eli and Ethan Bayner were still here so he could go to their house. They were his best friends—kind of his only friends—but they’d gone to Ohio for the summer because their parents might be getting a divorce.

She flicked her ashes in Gram’s rosebushes. “It’s going to rain,” she said. “The bees are all heading inside.”