The story was so sickening I wanted Hap to stop. But I knew he wasn’t going to. If he was really going to protect me, he couldn’t hold anything back. “Who did it?” My own voice seemed to bounce off the trees and into my lap like a stone, a small hard piece of the world.

“We don’t know yet.”

“Will Sheriff Flood catch him?”

“I believe he will.”

“How could anyone do a thing like that?” I asked him, though I already knew the answer. I’d seen all kinds of people twisted by pain and circumstance. People who’d been hurt so bad and so deep they couldn’t help but do the same to someone else. “Jenny was so young,” I cried, hot tears running into my mouth. “She didn’t even get to have a chance.”

“There’s death in life, Anna, things too impossible to bear. So many things, and yet we bear them.”

I knew he was right, but I would have given anything to hear something else. If only Hap could promise me that it would never happen again, that I would never die, and that he and Eden wouldn’t, either. That we would stay safe from harm together though the world was full of the most terrible things and people. People twisted up enough on the inside to murder a seventeen-year-old girl and leave her like trash in the river.

“How do we bear them?” I finally asked. “Those impossible things.”

His hand was still and warm on mine, warm and steady and alive. He hadn’t moved an inch from my side. “Like this, sweetheart.”

—

In the coming days, I take to launching out from my cabin with a backpack and no real destination except to be in the woods. Long ago, Hap taught me how to read and follow a trail, even a little-used one, and also how to travel without one. There’s nothing like it to quiet the mind. The beauty of the living world, damp ferns curled along the valley floor, lacy with moisture. Mustard-colored lichen and bearded moss splashed like paint against dark rocks and tree trunks. The canopy above like a map traced onto the sky.