We were a team, but I was the leader. I needed to gather up every piece of Marley spread out across every inch of this place before anyone else got to it. It was possible to both share the information and control what people thought of it. I watched Marley do it all the time. But if the Albany kids started finding things without me, they might continue to mishandle Marley’s memory. They wouldn’t even discuss her at all until I brought us together again, and this is how they chose to revisit what she’d been to us? I had to show them they were wrong.

The tunnel had led me back up, like Harrison’s letter said. The next clue was here. At the point of no return.

Perfect.

Every year, Marley scolded us when we inevitably gave up on finishing her scavenger hunt. “Ugh. It’s so obvious,” she’d say when the last of us surrendered. The last being me. Always. I’d have to give my verbal resignation because adventures ended with summer. I’d walk to her house at six thirty in the morning on the first day of the new school year and tell her I hadn’t found anything else. What she didn’t know is that I always kept searching even after that point, trying to squeeze meaning out of misplaced rocks in our driveway or even holes in my shirt. Papers discarded in the trash. Everything.

I started digging into the ground beneath the POINT OF NO RETURN sign. Sweat mixed with the blood falling from my face. Red drops dripped onto my clenched fists. After a while, something grazed the tips of my fingers. Soft and solid. Distinctly different. My digging took on new fervor. Right beneath the surface was a third of a journal: the front side leather bound, the back side sheets of paper dangling off binding. I pressed its sand-stained cover to my chest.

Marley’s journal.

In my mind, her words propped up and became a movie playing on fast-forward. The Albany kids were nowhere to be found on the first pages. Marley painted vignettes of the life she lived without us. Late nights with her dad in their shed, working on a project she never referred to with any specificity. Memories of drives to pageants all across the coast, her mom forcing her to eat only cottage cheese the entire weekend. Impressions of a fight between her parents as she overheard it from her bedroom. That particular entry devolved into direct quotes, each getting scratchier and more urgent, Marley fighting to keep pace with the crescendoing argument.

MOM: You didn’t love me like I asked of you.

DAD: I could say the same.

MOM: You know it’s not the same.

DAD: Karen.

MOM: Don’t try to compare. The sickest part is that still, I love you back, even though I know it’s not a good idea.