I’m beginning to see that he isn’t a hash-this-out sort of person. He’s an avoid-your-problems-forever sort of person. In this case, the problem is me. The I just want to be left alone is making me come out of my skin because I don’t know if I’m physically capable of leaving anyone alone when I know I’m responsible for them feeling bad.

Wesley’s slippery as a ghost, gone every time I turn the corner. I’ve never been able to stomach people’s being upset with me, needing that resolution. If he would let me get close enough to apologize, the dynamic could at least return to the way it was. Sure, he was grouchy, but when he avoided me it was a different sort of avoiding. Like a preference rather than a necessity. It’s as if I’ve walked in on him naked. The power balance has shifted.

I pluck a sheet of lilac stationery out of a rolltop desk and write.

 Hey,

 You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about. I’m grateful you let me stay in your room, putting yourself through a lot of trouble to do so. I know you’ve been sleeping at the manor for the last few days, but if you want you can have your room back and I’ll sleep on the couch. Also, I didn’t see many of your drawings when I was up there but what I saw was impressive. You don’t have to be embarrassed about those, either. I’m sorry again for snooping.

 Anyway, I saw something you didn’t want me to see, so I’ll tell you about something that’s embarrassing for me, too. It’s only fair.

 When I was fourteen, my mom and I stopped in at a diner in Lexington, Kentucky, right after she bought a lottery ticket. She put the ticket on the table between our plates, waiting until we were finished eating before scratching all the tiny Christmas trees off with a quarter. It was fun to pretend the ticket might land us a million dollars. We talked about what our dream home would look like. After we were done eating, she scratched the ticket and won six bucks, which she spent on two slices of apple pie.

 We left the diner, never went back again, but for some reason I thought about it a lot. It cheered me up to remember sitting in that booth, hoping that the ticket to an amazing new life sat right in front of me, waiting to happen.

 The first version of a café I’m always daydreaming about was based on that diner. I’ve remodeled it so many times since then, evolving the décor to suit whatever my tastes happen to be in the moment. I like to imagine all sorts of swoony romantic scenarios taking place there. The climax in every rom-com movie, basically, when the hero thinks he’s going to lose the girl and he professes his feelings with raw, desperate honesty. I daydream about fun banter, too, even mundane afternoons where all I’m doing is decorating donuts with colorful icing and sprinkles. But my favorite daydreams are those fast-paced ones where the stakes are high, when even I don’t know if the hero and heroine will get together because I get so carried away. Even though I’m the heroine in this fantasy, so I control it all.

 This is something I’ve never told anybody, so now we’re even. But if you tell another soul about Maybell’s Coffee Shop AU, I will cut you.

 —M

The front door closes right as I’m penning the last line. I glance at the window and there’s Wesley, taking to the woods. He skulks off into his self-made nature preserve every time the rain lets up, probably to escape all the fumes from our cleaning supplies. Or me. Probably me.

I could leave the note on the staircase for him to pick up when he returns, but my feet have other ideas. They decide they want to go on a walk, too.

Off I dash, waterlogged grass squelching under the oversized boots I saved from the dumpster. We’re teetering on the precipice of April, nearly ready to hop into May, the weather warming up. I lower the hood of my rain slicker, overhanging boughs catapulting raindrops from leaf to leaf.

He’s soundless, but the footprints give him away. They lead me to the trickle of water, a creek cutting through heavy green foliage. There are signs along the paths, wooden slabs nailed to tree trunks I was too distracted to notice the last time I was in the woods. Their edges are sharpened into pointing arrows, hand-painted with monikers like I Spy Something Blue Trail and Say Goodbye to the Sky Lane.

The path he’s chosen, You Are Here, isn’t one I’ve explored before—my heightened fear of being mauled by bears has prevented me from getting too adventurous—with an old stone bridge that I think used to be part of a road but is now overgrown with moss. I stop to remove my glasses, lenses steamed up with my breath from the exercise.

Wesley’s trail of footprints ends here.

I glance uneasily over the sides of the bridge. The water’s high from all the rain we’ve been getting, pouring swiftly between rocks, over dips, gurgling and eddying. He wouldn’t jump in, would he? The water’s too cold for swimming. Sunlight takes a while to reach the ground here, moist stones dappled with soft green, atmosphere cool and peaceful. Otherworldly. I peruse beds of fallen pine needles for a shoe-shaped disturbance but find nothing. It’s as if Wesley sauntered across this bridge and straight through an invisible portal. He’s in a medieval forest right now, taming a wild unicorn, and I’m standing here studying pine needles like they’re a Rorschach test.

A bird’s nearby trill jerks my head up. It’s a very helpful bird, giving away the location of another creature up in the branches, and if looks could kill it would be roasted on a plate with carrots and potatoes.

“Ahh. There you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

Wesley’s lounging in a white oak towering directly over me that’s got to be hundreds of years old, one of the thick, lichen-scaled boughs bending like a hammock to fit him perfectly. Its roots burrow into the bridge like clamping fingers, tendons, and bone. From my position on the ground he’s about eight feet up, watching me with Oh, no written all over his face.

“There’s no escaping me,” I tell him. It comes out sounding disturbingly ominous.