The Girl Who Chased the Moon: A Novel - By Sarah Addison Allen Page 0,44

her. Maybe one day in the future, baking cakes would bring her daughter—who had a sweet sense like her father—back to Julia. Then she would explain why she gave her up. At the very least, it would carry Julia’s love to her.

Wherever she was.

Nearly twenty years later, Julia was still calling out to her. Knowing she was out there in the world somewhere was what got Julia through every single day. She couldn’t imagine a life without knowing that.

Sawyer was living that unimaginable life.

It was then that she knew she had to tell him.

She thought she’d been miserable here before.

The next six months were going to be hell.

JULIA HEARD a light tapping at her door. She opened her eyes and was surprised to see that the sky was blackberry blue and the first star of the night was out. She got up and went to her bedroom doorway.

“Julia?” Stella called. “Julia, are you all right? You’ve been awfully quiet up here. Sawyer’s gone, if that’s what you’re waiting for.” There was a pause. “Okay. I’ll be downstairs if you need me. If you want to talk.”

She heard Stella walk back down the stairs.

Julia rested her head against the doorjamb for a moment, then she walked into the hallway. She paused at the door to the stairs, then walked past it and into the kitchen.

A hummingbird cake, she decided as she turned on the kitchen light. It was made with bananas and pineapples and pecans and had a cream cheese frosting.

She would make it light enough to float away.

She reached over to open the window.

To float to her daughter.

Chapter 10

The car had an eight-track player.

The steering wheel was huge, like it should be on a boat.

The interior smelled like cough drops. And she loved it.

Emily loved this car.

When Vance’s mechanic dropped the car off that next day, she eagerly sat behind the wheel. But then she realized that she couldn’t think of anywhere she wanted to go. The more she thought about it, the more she didn’t really want to leave Mullaby. Although she would never say it out loud—she would never tell another living soul—there was a part of her now finding an odd comfort in her mother’s fallibility. Dulcie had set an impossible standard in Boston, and Emily thought she could never do enough, care enough, work hard enough. And sometimes she’d resented it, which made her feel even worse. But it turns out even Dulcie herself couldn’t live up to that standard. At least not here.

Emily sat in the car until it became too hot, then she got out. She couldn’t go next door to visit, because Julia had left earlier. And she didn’t want to go back inside her own house, because Grandpa Vance was taking a nap, and the new butterfly wallpaper in her room made her nervous. She would swear it moved sometimes, and she couldn’t figure out how. She walked aimlessly to the back of the house. The yard was so overgrown that, at eye level, it was hard to even see the gazebo at the back of the property. Looking around, she was amazed that she’d come away with only a cut on her heel that night she’d chased the Mullaby lights.

She hadn’t seen the light in the woods since she’d come back from the lake, and she was a little disappointed. Making sense of at least one thing here would be nice.

With nothing better to do, she began to pick up twigs and fallen limbs from the yard. She checked the garage for a lawn mower, but didn’t find one. She did find some shears, though, and went to the gazebo and began to trim back the wild boxwood bushes, flustering a large frog who was hiding in the shade there.

As she slowly worked her way around the gazebo, shortening the bushes so the posts and latticework could be seen, the fat frog followed her.

At one point, she lobbed off a bit of boxwood and a twig fell onto the frog. She laughed and bent to lift it off of him, and that’s when she saw it.

A large heart with the initials D.S. + L.C. carved inside.

It was carved onto a back post of the gazebo, near the bottom, just like on the tree at the lake.

Her fingers reached out to trace the lines of the heart. Logan Coffey had been in this backyard. She didn’t know why her eyes went to the woods, just a hunch, but there, on one of