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EPILOGUE

PUT A RING ON IT

HOLT

ONE YEAR LATER

The council approved the name WREN’S LOOKOUT. The new sign goes up on the morning of this year’s Harvest Festival.

I made it myself, out of a slab of cedar from a tree that came down in the big storm. I carved every letter by hand on the porch, at night, while Wren was asleep, and I hid it under a tarp in the shed for three weeks. She thinks the tarp is covering a broken lawnmower.

It isn’t. It says WREN’S LOOKOUT, in letters as tall as my hand, with a tiny carved wren perched on the W.

Brody flew it up to the shelf at dawn. Celeste held the ladder, and the drill, and the coffee, and also gave a lot of instructions that nobody asked for.

“Left,” she says now. “No, your other left. Holt, how are you a ranger?”

“I don’t need to know left. I have a compass.”

“A little more,” Brody says, squinting. “Perfect. Ship it.”

I drive in the last screw and step back. The sign hangs over the entrance to the deck, right where the trail comes around the bend in the pines and the whole valley opens up in front of you. Anyone who stands on this rock will see it. They’ll know who saw it first.

Brody claps me on the shoulder. “She’s going to cry.”

“She’s not going to cry.”

“She’s going to cry so hard,” Celeste says happily. She checks her watch, then her phone, and her cheeks go pink the way they always do when a certain grumpy detective texts her. She types a fast reply. “I’ve got to go. Good luck, big guy.”

“I don’t need luck.”

Brody snorts. “You’ve checked your pocket eleven times since we got here.”

I have. I check it again.

I wake up every morning with Wren in my bed.

It’s been a year, and I still can’t get used to it. Her cold feet on my shins. Her purple hair across my pillow. Her new bass guitar in the corner of the living room, and her muddy boots by the door next to mine, and her toothbrush in the cup by the sink. Her coffee mug on the hook beside my giant one.

Her old suitcase sits at the foot of our bed. It’s full of blankets now. She unpacked it the week she moved in, every last sock, and then she stood there looking at it like she didn’t know what to do with an empty suitcase.

“Blankets,” I said.

“Blankets?”

“You’re always cold.”

She laughed, and filled it with every spare blanket in the cabin, and now she sits on it to pull her boots on every morning. Nothing in my life has ever made me happier.

On the shelf above the fireplace, there are two carved wrens.

One is mine, the one I gave her the week of the dark moon, with every feather and the eye stripe. The other one is hers. She made it last winter, on the porch, with my knife and a lot of swearing. It’s lumpy, and one wing is bigger than the other, and it looks more like a potato with a beak.

It’s my favorite thing I own.

The festival is twice as big as last year. Celeste’s clickers say two thousand by lunchtime, with volunteers handling timed entry. The squirrel steals a corn dog. Molly, who’s six now and missing both front teeth, shows me she can reach the top rail from the right side and says, “Every time,” before I can ask.

And Wren is everywhere. She leads three guided walks before noon. She shows a busload of retirees the frog ramp. She explains to a man in a fishing vest, again, that the north loop is closed for good.