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Prologue

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As seemed to be the custom, bad news came in with the evening mail. First the news that his granddaughter had been rejected from her top choice college, then a call to jury duty. Ethan had heard somewhere that bad news came in threes. Today, though, it was much worse. Today, it was the death of someone he had known many years before, and an invitation to the funeral in Ellison, Alabama. When he read the name, typed neatly in curled script, he knew that he would be attending.

It had been sixty years.

Ethan was frozen on the front stoop, the door wide open and the rest of the mail discarded on the doormat. His fingers, gnarled and spotted with age, shook as they clung to the ornamented piece of paper for dear life. Slowly, like a blind man, he stumbled back into the house, his entire body quivering. He stopped when he knocked into the kitchen table, but did not feel the pain.

A vase tipped over and spiraled toward the ground. The blue glass shattered with a sickening series of cracks, sending sharp fragments skidding about Ethan's feet. He heard his wife coming down the stairs.

"Honey?" she called, appearing in the doorway wearing her sensible shoes and sensible pants, smoothing back her sensibly short haircut. She saw the mess and tsked quietly, shaking her head as she tiptoed gingerly over the glass and retrieved a dustpan from the cupboard.

"What happened?" she asked, groaning as her knees cracked with the effort of crouching down. She swept up the pieces, leaving the checkered tiles safe and clean, but even when she'd emptied the pan into the trash can beneath the sink, Ethan could not speak. He felt as starved for words as a newborn child, and as helpless-all he could manage was a small whimper and a shaking hand thrust out in Eleanor's direction, clutching the letter.

She took it from him, gently, her thin hands built for handling butterflies, and lifted her glasses to her nose. He watched her lips read as they always did when she was reading something to herself; he watched her face change, her lips droop and her eyes widen, as she continued down the page.

"Oh," she murmured, finishing the letter and letting it drift from her hand and onto the kitchen table. "Oh, Ethan." And then she was holding him, lovingly and protectively, shielding him from that town a thousand miles, a thousand years away. He wished to shrink, to melt into her embrace and disappear like a wink.

When she pulled away, he was surprised to find that her eyes were damp. Ethan touched his own cheek, felt no tears. He was numb.

"I have to go," he said hoarsely, staring at the unassuming page. 

"You don't." Eleanor's voice was sharp. "For this? Ethan, no. You don't have to go back to that place for this."

Ethan could only shake his head. "You don't understand. I know how it seems, I know what you must think, but I—I have to go. Please, Eleanor. Trust me."

She reached out to him, placing those butterfly hands on both his arms and squeezing tightly. After a long moment, she nodded. "Okay," she whispered. "If you must do it, I'll trust you. But Ethan, you won't be by yourself this time. I swear it."

She took his hand, and he thought, God bless Eleanor. Eleanor, who had been named after her Roosevelt counterpart, who could sew and cook and could also outrun him in their younger days. Eleanor, who was clever and sensible and kind.

"No," he told her. Pain and fear snapped his voice in two, but he shook his head again, again, again. "I love you. I do, of course I do. But this-this is something I need to do alone."

She stroked his cheek, her light skin luminescent against his darker tone. She looked just as beautiful now, gray hair, wrinkles, and all, as she had in high school, when she was just that cute girl down the street who sometimes spared him a passing glance, if he was lucky. And now, all these years later, she looked at him with a sad, understanding half smile and nodded-because she knew what he could handle, knew what he wanted, and would stand behind him, always. She was his quiet ocean.

"Okay," she said to him now, kissing him lightly on the cheek. "But if you change your mind..."

He nodded. "I know." He forced a smile at her and picked up the letter, tucking it into his pocket. He remembered, then, the pile of mail that had fallen from his fingers, and went out to pick it up. As he opened the front door, he tried not to think about Ellison.

Of course, he failed.

He had promised himself, years and years before, that he would never go back there. Still, when he closed his eyes at night, he saw them in his mind, taunting, teasing, screaming-their pale hands pushing him to the ground. He could only hope that things had changed; somehow, though, he couldn't imagine they had. He couldn't believe that this, of all things, would grip his heart and pull him back to the town that had hurt him more than anything ever had.

But the town-that wasn't what hurt, not really. That summer almost sixty years ago was just a blink, one of so many summers. He should have been able to force the worst parts from his memory.

But he couldn't. Because of her. The girl who had breezed into his summer as if she owned it, and of course she had. The girl who had changed everything. He closed his eyes and, even now, so far removed, he saw her smile.

She had forest fire hair and hurricane eyes, and when he met her it was as if his world had been set aflame and thrown into an angry storm. She hit him in the worst way, like an unexpected earthquake, leaving dust and debris in her wake; and in the best way, like a flash flood after five years of drought, healing the parched earth with a gentle touch. She was, in equal parts, a gift and a natural disaster, as she crashed on him like an avalanche on a faraway mountain somewhere, burying him, suffocating him. She was the cruelest thing to ever enter his life, and the only thing he ever needed to be happy.

Her name was Juniper Jones.

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