The Girl Who Chased the Moon: A Novel - By Sarah Addison Allen Page 0,28

upstairs and finished sweeping, then she sat on the balcony and waited for the lights.

And so ended her second full day in Mullaby.

LATER THAT evening, when Vance ducked out of his room to check the dryer one last time before bed, he paused to look up the staircase. He didn’t hear any more shuffling. No more scraping of a broom. Emily had settled in for the night.

It was a peculiar thing, he thought, having someone in the house again. He’d almost forgotten what it was like. Emily made the air different, vibrating, as if there were music close by but he couldn’t quite hear it. He was surprised by how much fuller he felt with her near, and he didn’t know how to handle it. Being needed was a lot like being tall—it was never really an issue until other people were around.

Vance had towered over all the other kids in kindergarten. That was his first memory of truly understanding how tall he was. Up until then, while he was certainly big for his age, he was still the shortest member of his own normal-sized family. Some kids in school teased him at first, but there a came a point when they realized that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to pick a fight with someone who could knock them over with only the wind he caused by walking past them.

His family was gone now. Vance was the only one left of the Shelbys, and he had inherited the existing fortune. He knew he wasn’t supposed to have it all. It wasn’t supposed to all come down to him—the Shelby legacy, the Shelby name. There were supposed to be brothers and sisters who would do great things. There were supposed to be normal kids in his family. For a while there were. But his older sister, for whom the wallpaper in her room was always pink candy swirls, drowned in Piney Woods Lake when she was eleven. And then there was his younger brother, who died from a fall out of the tree house in the front yard when he was six. His parents tried for more children after that, but to no avail. They were stuck with Vance. Vance, who was so tall his feet reached the bottom of the lake, so he could never drown, and his arms reached all the way to the limbs in the trees, so he never had to climb and fall.

His parents died when he was in his twenties. He thought he saw disappointment in their faces when they passed away. Their legacy, it was all going to the giant. What was Vance going to do with it? they probably thought. He’d never get married. Who would want him?

He was thirty-two and living alone, rarely venturing outside, when he met Lily. She was related to the Sullivans down the street and, while attending State, came to visit them one weekend. If she’d been a color, she would have been bright green. If she’d been a scent, she would have been new paper. She was happy and intelligent and afraid of nothing. The Sullivan boys, who had taken to throwing balls into Vance’s yard and daring each other to fetch them and risk getting eaten by the Giant of Mullaby, had shared this story with their cousin. Lily was appalled. She took them by their ears and forced them into the yard and up the front porch steps, determined to get them to apologize. When Vance came to the door, Lily was so stunned that she let go of the boys. They instantly ran away. A few hours later, when Lily hadn’t returned home, they cried to their mother that the Giant of Mullaby had eaten her. When their mother went to investigate, she found Lily and Vance sitting on the front porch steps, drinking iced tea and laughing. She’d paused, then backed away. Something wonderful was happening and she could see it right away. No one had ever made Vance laugh like that.

Vance and Lily married after Lily graduated, and Lily taught second grade at Mullaby Elementary until she became pregnant with Dulcie. Those were halcyon days. Lily didn’t let him stay in the house. She insisted they go grocery shopping together, go to the movie theater, attend Little League games. People had always been curious about him, but that was only because he used to hide. Once he left the house, he came to realize that Mullaby easily accepted him. He was,