Page 41 of The Moonlight Healers

Louise sat down on the creaky wooden porch steps. One of the boards was rotted, and the exterior paint was peeling, but it still felt like home, because it was the only place where they had all been together, where her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother had been so close it sometimes felt like they were sisters, drinking wine on the porch swing while Louise ran in circles in the grass. She was never scared, even as darkness fell and she ran down the rows of the fruit trees, the little cottage hidden by branches. She always knew the three most important people in her life were there under the lights, their heads together, talking for hours.

She looked out past the orchard, at the mountains, turned cobalt blue by the moon. Whenever she visited her grandmother and spent the night, she was always struck by how different Crozet was, how deep the quiet, how the darkness seemed more solid, vast and infinite in a way it wasn’t in Richmond. She heard bird cries she never heard back home, songs she had known as a child, warblers and woodpeckers and whip-poor-wills. Her great-grandmother, Helene, used to sit with Louise and point out all the different birds as they landed at the feeder.

“Some of the old mountain people around here think that one, the whip-poor-will, is a death omen,” Helene had told Louise one evening, as they sat in the yard waiting for Louise’s mom to get off work. “That they arrive when it’s time for a soul to depart, and carry it with them as they go.”

Louise had watched the large, squat, brown bird as it pecked at the seed, feeling a shiver of dread. “Is that true?”

“No, Louise.” Her great-grandmother had smiled. “They just like the night. They aren’t afraid to sing in the darkness.”

Louise made out the sound of footsteps. Peter walked toward her wearing the same clothes from the day before.

“Hey,” Louise said as he approached. With Camille alwayspresent, they had both acted normal the entire evening, though whenever Louise had glanced in Peter’s direction he was already looking her way.

Off in the distance, a frog let out a low croak.

“Can’t sleep?” Peter asked as he eased himself down onto the step beside her.

Louise shook her head.

“Me neither.” Peter pointed back at the cottage. “Is this…?”

“Yep,” Louise said.

Peter nudged her shoulder, and Louise felt a flutter in her stomach that she tried to ignore.

“I think it’s nice.” He smiled. “Better than a treehouse even.”

She had told Peter about the cottage countless times. When they were eight, she said it was a tree house, set up high in the woods. Then it was a log cabin, with an outhouse for a bathroom. Over the years, the stories became less and less colorful, until finally the cottage was just a little house.

They sat in easy silence, gazing out over the orchard, which spread down the hillside and disappeared into the dark, watching as the air lit up with hundreds of glowing embers. She remembered catching fireflies with Helene and Camille, squealing with delight as she opened her hands to see them light up, impossibly bright for creatures so small.

“This place reminds me of camp,” Peter said softly.

Their summer camp was in south Virginia, on a flat expanse of land alongside a river. There were no mountains or orchards, but she understood what he meant, how the sky there felt endless, the nights sweet with the smells of summer, how time was slower, more deliberate. Louise always liked camp, but Peter had loved it. He was a natural there, extroverted and funny, and when they first went in elementary school, before Peter grew a foot and joined the track team and got noticed by girls, it was his escape. It was the place where it didn’t matter what grades he earned in reading or math, where he didn’t have to be separated into a group for extra help, where people only knew him for his strengths. And even as he got older and made friends with the popular kids, when he didn’t need camp in the same way, Louise knew it would always be his safe space.

“I can see that. Especially at night,” she told him.

“Like when we all sneaked out to that abandoned cabin in the woods.”

Louise couldn’t help but smile. “When youforcedme to sneak out to that abandoned cabin in the woods. I wanted to sleep!”

“It was our last summer as campers. That’s practically mandatory.”

“Remember the failed prank to bring the go-carts down to the lake?”

Peter leaned back against one of the porch columns and faced Louise. “God, those things were so heavy.”

Louise laughed. “Not the best idea.”

Peter smiled, and Louise leaned against the opposite column, her legs straight out in front of her. In the darkness of the night, it felt like just another blissful summer, the two of them up late, sleeping in a tent in Peter’s yard, until one of them got scared and convinced the other to run back inside.

Peter’s brow furrowed. “Aren’t you going to miss it? Camp? All of it?”

Their eyes met, and Louise’s breath caught in her throat. She had been so distracted by the events of the last few days—Kyle’s party, the accident, the healing—that she had buried the cold, clammy fear that they wouldn’t be spending the summer together, that in the fall Peter would stay behind in Richmond, and she would be living six hours away.

She nodded, an ache in her chest.

She wanted to say the words out loud, the ones that had been fighting to the surface. That he had always been what she wanted, that she saved his life out of sheer will, because there was no world for her in which he didn’t exist. She almost letherself imagine the summer as it could be, full of nights like this one, under star-streaked skies, Peter beside her, not as her friend but as more.

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