“I know,” she said. “My dad told me about the kid in the treehouse. Said you’ve been up there since you were six.”
It was the summer of 2014, and Leo was fifteen, too old for the treehouse but too young to admit it. The treehouse sat at the edge of his uncle’s property, a plywood-and-nail cathedral built by cousins who’d long since grown up and moved away. Leo went there every day that July, not to play, but to watch. From that perch, he could see the whole dip of the valley—the old highway, the creek like a bent zipper, and the house across the field where a girl named Mira had just moved in. the missing -2014-
Leo read it seven times. Then he climbed back up to his perch and sat there until the stars came out. He didn’t cry. He just watched the empty house, waiting for a light that never turned on. “I know,” she said
Leo nearly fell out of the tree. He waved back, stiff as a flagpole. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “You gonna watch me all summer, or are you gonna come down?” The treehouse sat at the edge of his
“I’m Leo,” he said.
Mira was seventeen. She wore a leather jacket even in the heat and sat on her porch steps smoking thin cigarettes, blowing the smoke up at the sky like she was sending messages. Leo had never spoken to her, but he’d memorized the way she tucked her hair behind one ear, the way she laughed at her phone with her whole body.