Page 70 of The Hunting Moon
Yes.
While she waits for the kettle to boil so she can make a cup of tea, sheremembers Jay in her kitchen. Jay in her bedroom. Young Jay, old Jay, a thousand iterations she loved from the first day she met him.
The kettle whistles. Winnie steeps her chamomile in a tall, ancient mug with Pikachu on the side. The heat warms her hand; the steam warms her nose. She shuffles upstairs, shuts herself in her bedroom, and sinks down at her desk.
It’s like she never left four hours ago.
A sip of tea, and Winnie withdraws Darian’s birthday cards from her pocket. Jay’syeswill have to wait in favor of a new one: theyesthat comes when you’ve run out of reasons to procrastinate. When a task must be done, and now is the time for doing it. On the one hand, itstillfeels wrong to open up something that wasn’t sent to her…
But on the other hand, Winnie’s Venn diagrams need more information, and that information might live inside these envelopes that Mom has collected each year from the family mailbox.
After spreading the cards on her desk, Winnie stares for several minutes. Four red squares. Four potential clues from Dad. Her knee bounces. Her fingers tap.
Then she takes a steeling sip of tea and, with fingers warm from the mug, she tears into each envelope.Rrriiiippp,goes the paper.Rrrrrriiiippp, rrrrriiiippp, rrrriiiippp.
She slides out the cards and lays them before her. Her chest feels tight as she studies them. Her teeth click softly behind her closed lips. They are identical to the plain white postcards Dad sent her on her own birthday, yet Dad wrote significantly less for Darian—so little, in fact, that there is nowhere for any secret message to hide.
Happy Birthday, Son. Love you.
Below these straightforward assertions is a drawing. Simple, clean lines from a man trained in landscape architecture. Fromtheman who bought Winnie her first sketchbook, her first graphite drawing pencil. The man who first showed her how you can capture the essence of a place without actually drawing everything you see.
But where Dad always stuck to flowers, to trees, to gardens stretched before him, Winnie found she preferred sketching people… and then nightmares. The rules he taught her still applied to people and nightmares, though, and essence ultimately mattered more than accuracy.
A pen distilling crude thoughts into feelings across a page.
Right now, the essence is very clear: Dad has drawn a family of four with their arms around each other. No faces, only the vague outline of hair and shoulders and arms and torsos. A dad, a mom, a brother, a sister. Everyone but the mom wears glasses, and though they lack specific features, there is no missing the ease in their postures, the comfort in their togetherness.
And that is when it happens. A bright, hungry feeling that glitters like siren scales. That feels like the rising sun after the dawn mist has fled. It is warm and buoyant as it scrapes with gentle claws inside Winnie’s rib cage.
Hope.
Desperatehope that things can go back to what they were. That these four figures Dad drew can exist again, exactly as they are in the illustration, where expressions don’t matter because the essence says everything:We love each other and always will.
But it’s an impossible hope—not merely improbable, but trulyimpossible.Because even if Winnie can somehow finish solving Dad’s clues, what will that do for her? She doesn’t know where he is; she doesn’t know if Mom or Darian will want him back; and four years have passed with struggle and pain, with rage and grief and hate. None of that can be undone.
She hates hope. Shehatesit. She thought she had killed it four years ago when it was clear there would never be any fairness for her family, never be any justice. Shehatesthat instead of eradicating that hope, she has actually only hidden it away all this time in her secret lockbox.
It was always there, just waiting for a moment like this to overwhelm her.
Winnie feels heat on her cheeks. She swipes a tear aside and flips the postcard over. Just like her own birthday cards, the next three cards are exact replicas of the first.Happy Birthday, Son. Love you.The only change is that in each illustration, Winnie gets a little taller. Darian a little more fleshed out. It is surprisingly accurate, and not for the first time, Winnie wonders how Dad got these cards in the family mailbox.
And why Mom didn’t turn them over to the Council.
Winnie yanks off her glasses to dig more forcefully at her eyes. “No,” she whispers to the questions rising in her brain.What if you can have him back? What if you can be that family again?“No, no, no.”
It doesn’t matter how many times she says it. The hope has returned, andthis time, it will not be shoved away. Because the truth is that it was never fear that propelled her to follow her father’s clues. It was never a desire to avoid getting in trouble again with the Tuesdays. And it wasnevera need to protect Hemlock Falls from some Diana who might have framed Dad.
It was always pitiful, pathetic hope.What if you can have him back? What if you can be that family again?
Winnie shoves away from her desk. These cards have no answers for her, they offer nothing useful for her Venn diagram. She’s glad she never showed them to Darian.
And now she wishes she’d never shown them to herself.
It is almost an hour later—and after two cups of tea—that Winnie’s brain finally feels settled enough to attempt sleep. She has corpse duty in the morning; she can’t miss that, even if it means facing Marcus.
It is as she is curling under her covers in her pj’s that she notices something she should have noticed the instant she stepped into her room: theabsenceof any smell. There should be a smell…
But there isn’t one.
