“I made some lemonade earlier. Let’s go inside and we can forget that we even went. I could find my old card deck and we could play gin rummy like old times.”

If he followed her inside and accepted her offer to forget, the day could still be saved. It wasn’t too late to start over, he only had to choose. If something were to ever bloom between them, it would begin with this—with her asking, in the only way she could, if he would choose her too.

“Nah, I’m good. I better go.”

Mira shook her head and watched him as he gave up, waved goodbye, and left.

A few days after, the police found pieces of a body less than a half mile away from the Woodsman Plantation, washed up against the riverbank. Fish had eaten bits of the flesh. A large abrasion marked the right side of his forehead, possibly from a strike against a rock as he was carried downstream.

Mira said nothing when the body was found, believing if she kept quiet maybe she could convince herself that they hadn’t been out in the woods that day, but then Celine told someone where they’d gone, one of her newly made friends, a girl named Cassie she’d been trying to impress, and Cassie told her group of friends, and they told their other friends, and before anyone knew it the whole school had heard. Like a game of telephone, the story got changed with the retelling. Jesse went out to the Woodsman. Jesse broke into the Woodsman place. Jesse’s been sneaking out onto the Woodsman property. I heard he’s been squatting in that Woodsman house, probably vandalizing it too. You know that’s what they all do, destroy other people’s property. Doing whatever the hell they want. Can’t even take care of their own. Go out to where he lives and you’ll see. No wonder he goes to the Woodsmans’. If you saw that dump part of town you wouldn’t want to stay there either.

“I didn’t realize it’d be a big deal,” Celine confessed to Mira, and that could have been the end of it, except the police found a path made from the river through the woods back to the Woodsman house. Except they found the blood—Jesse’s, from when he’d cut himself. Except they found a bloodied scrap of fabric hanging from a branch. Except they found fingerprints on the window, and handprints smudged all along the front door. The police believed Jesse had been caught breaking in and ran. There was a scuffle at the river and the man was killed, his body dumped in the water in the hope it would disappear. Before Mira knew it, they’d arrested Jesse.