By the time we turn into the Tempest Gardens parking lot, the rain is already stopping, gone as quickly as it came. Hawthorn walks me toward the cottage, one hand on my back, her long fingers splayed from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.

She stops me a few feet from cottage nine. I assume that she’ll knock on the door, deliver me home, but instead she pulls me around the side, into the mulch of the border garden. There’s only one type of flower here, a Barbie-pink nasturtium. Hawthorn looks down at them as if this is all their fault. I crumple a few under my feet as she tucks me into the space between the corner and the window.

“You’re sure it was him?” Hawthorn asks. “I mean, absolutely sure?” Her voice is different than usual. It reminds me of the redwoods I’ve seen that have been hit by lightning, their tops stripped of bark, pale insides showing.

It takes me a second to find the truth, and then another second to be sure of it. “You and the hermit?”

Hawthorn shrugs.

“Do the rest of the Grays know?”

Is it terrible that I want to know all the things you don’t tell each other?

“They do and they don’t,” she says. “I couldn’t really talk about it with them.” She looks down at her feet in their cloth sneakers. They’re damp from standing in the border garden after the rain.

I see his feet in bare earth.

I feel something, a wisp of what the hermit felt for her. It’s there, as warm as the last droplets of sunlight.

“The Grays didn’t understand about Neil?” I ask. “Why?” I think about all of the restrictions we put on each other, all the ways we don’t understand. I didn’t want to believe that could happen here.

Hawthorn squirms, looking up at the sky. “Except for living in a tree, Neil was really . . . ordinary.”

“Ohhh.” Ordinary is the one of the few things the Grays wouldn’t be able to get their otherwise open minds around. But I can’t imagine Hawthorn ran into that particular quality a lot, growing up on Ora’s farm. “Maybe that made him special to you. Maybe that’s something about him you actually liked.”

Hawthorn winces, as if I found a truth she was planning on keeping hidden from herself for a little while longer.

I give her one of my secrets in trade. “That boy we found? Sebastian? He was out in the woods because of me. We climbed a tree together. We almost kissed.”

Hawthorn nods, like she hears all the parts I’m not saying.