He smiled his lesson-giving smile. “Yes, of course, but let me share with you the gift of your name that you don’t know. There was a man, a lover of nature, in fact, whose surname is spelled the way your given name is.”

“Nope.” I moved to pass him and walk back to the field, but he widened his own stance, and trees and boulders on the trail edge trapped me.

“Two words: John. Muir.”

I was going to need surgery to get my eyes unlodged from the back of my head.

Joellen’s job involves driving to places she’s never been on almost a daily basis, so she loves the GPS navigation thing on her dashboard. But sometimes she’ll accidentally turn it on when she’s leaving her house to drive to her office, a route she’s driven for twenty years, and the GPS lady starts directing her how to leave her parking spot and drive down the driveway to the street she’s lived on forever, and she can’t turn it off and she just starts yelling at it, things like, “Oh my God, yes, turn right at the stop sign; I am going to kill this thing. Shut up shut up shut up!”

Natan was a GPS navigation system with a patchy goatee telling me how to get out of my parking space, and I wanted to kill him. Blood thundered in my ears, I moved to step around him, a good ten inches taller than me and he would not budge. My heart raced. I scanned the ground around me.

Something to use, a heavy thing I can hold.

“I can tell you all about the man whose name you share, anytime. I notice you’re not with Sean the way you once were,” he said, performing concern, his voice a husky whisper. “I’m so sorry to see your bond has lost strength. Tell me, was your relationship with him one of a sexual nature?”

I was panting, shallow, like riding out an asthma attack. Maybe I was. My racing brain paused for a moment to consider.

All that city night-walking, all those years riding public transportation, foster houses galore, but it has to happen in the forest, the place where I’m safest and that I love best?

Not today.

Fallen branch. I stared at it, gnarled and big, partly buried in dead leaves and moss, I could get it with both hands—

Stupid to take my eyes off him.

“Muiriel.” So close I felt his hot breath, and I screamed, my body twisted, my bent knee moved straight up, strong, hard.

Contact.