Stolen Read Free Page B

didn’t with this—jumping into a trap without running a vine in first?”
    She scowled. “Are you going to help me out or not?”
    He disappeared, and came back with a fallen tree limb, which he extended into the pit.
    “Thanks,” she mumbled after he heaved her out.
    Lock plucked a piece of bark from Bree’s hair and tossed it aside. “Don’t mention it.”
    Bree pulled the rest of the boughs off the trap. She cleared away the packed moss and earth that made it so deceiving, lugged aside the stitched branch-work so no one else would mistake their footing. Lock watched her, silent. When she straightened, he looked sad again.
    “Are you sure Heath’s okay?” she asked.
    “For now. Hey, Bree? I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier.”
    “I’m sorry about the trap, the spike, everything.”
    “You already apologized. Are you listening? I’m sorry. Heath’s healing and it’s over and done, and I shouldn’t have sent you off. Heath would have wanted you there. I wanted you there.”
    He looked wounded, and it broke Bree’s heart. She threw her arms around his middle and pressed her cheek to his chest. He returned the hug, and when they stepped apart, Bree thought he might be looking at her differently.
    “Do you still need help patching the roof?” she asked.
    “Always knew I could count on you.”
    And then he ruffled her hair, gave her a teasing shove. Like she was a sibling. Like the little sister he couldn’t live without.
    Stupid, stupid, stupid, Bree thought, and followed him back into town.
    They finished the patch job with only a fraction of summer light remaining, but stayed on the roof far longer.
    Chelsea had brought them fish from the town center, and they’d eaten while working. Now, with the heat of the day finally fading, they were too exhausted to move. Lying side by side on the roof, they watched the stars emerge between the breaks in the trees. The sky was midnight blue.
    “Are you worried?” she asked Lock.
    “About?”
    “You know what.”
    He bit his bottom lip as though it were edible, like breaking the skin might make words come more easily.
    “How come you don’t talk to the stars anymore, Bree?”
    “Don’t change the subject.”
    “Answer my question and I’ll answer yours.”
    Bree scowled at the pinpricks of light overhead. That’s all they were—light. Her ma had once said that her father was up there. That anyone you lost was. That to be near them again, to speak to them, all you had to do was talk to the stars. But Bree had screamed at them after her mother’s passing—she’d yelled for her to come back, to not leave her alone, to show that she loved her by returning—and it hadn’t done a damn thing. That’s how Chelsea had found Bree the night she offered the girl a new home: Heath was bundled in the woman’s arms, Lock at her side wearing a too-big sweater and even larger eyes, and Bree had been hollering at the stars. But Bree’s mother hadn’t listened, so she’d reluctantly gone with Chelsea, wondering if perhaps she’d been too harsh on her mother.
    Bree whispered after that, spoke softly, politely. But by the time she’d turned twelve it was obvious her mother—if she could even hear the pleas—didn’t care. Bree never spoke to the sky again.
    “Stars are stars, not people,” she said to Lock.
    “But we bury our dead in the ground, and they become dirt, which springs new grass, which feeds animals, that end up in the ground in turn. And if we burn the deceased, they become air and ash. If we send them to sea, they dissolve in salt. It’s like we’re all one and the same—like there’s a bit of us in everything. Why not the stars, too?”
    Bree frowned. “For the same reason I destroyed that trap today: Some things are real, and some are in our minds. Sometimes we make ourselves believe because we are desperate. Or weak.”
    “I don’t think you’re weak,” he said.
    She angled her head toward him. She couldn’t tell if he was