Chapter One: The Anniversary
The sign had said ROAD CLOSED for so long that most of the letters had faded off. Now it took some squinting and a little faith to read it, but Parker figured it still got the point across.
Behind the sign, a row of concrete barriers blocked off the old highway. Behind the barriers, the road ran into the fog and disappeared. The pavement was cracked and patched with moss, and vines were creeping in from both edges like the forest was slowly pulling a blanket over it. But the road kept going. Three miles through the mountains, all the way to where it came out by the new highway on the other side.
Nobody had driven it in thirty years. Parker planned to walk every foot of it.
The barriers themselves had gone gray and soft-edged. Somebody had spray-painted a name on the middle one years ago, and the weather had eaten it down. Moss grew in the bolt holes. The forest had assumed that people were done here, and until this morning, it had been right.
He hadn’t been up here since the crash. One year ago today.
A year was a long time. He’d grown two inches. He’d turned twelve in November. He’d made the school wrestling team, quit it, and made it again. According to Maya, he’d also started to smell. She had announced this in the lunch line, out loud, with hand motions. He’d eaten about a hundred dinners across the table from his mom while she gave him the look that asked are you okay without using any actual words.
But standing at the barriers, he felt exactly like the kid he’d been that day. Eleven years old and shaking, wishing he could rewind the world by one afternoon.
Behind him, his brother’s truck idled on the shoulder of the new road.
“Last chance to pick a normal hobby,” Cole said through the open window. Cole was seventeen and had a real talent for not asking questions, which made him the perfect ride for the day. “Five o’clock at the north junction, by that little jam stand. If you’re not there by five thirty, I start honking. If you’re not there by six, I call Mom, and then we’re all dead.”
“Five o’clock,” Parker said. “We’ll be there.”
Cole looked past him, down the old road. For a second his grin slipped. “Come back safe, bro,” he said. Then the truck pulled away, the engine noise fading down the valley, and it was just the two of them and the mountain.
Parker watched the taillights until the curve took them. Cole had known Sam too. Everybody had known Sam. But Cole was the only person who’d heard the whole plan and asked exactly one question: what time to show up. Parker needed to do this without the worrying and the speeches.
Parker had told his mom he was going hiking with Maya. That part was true. He’d just skipped the part about where. She would have said no. Or worse, she wouldn’t have said anything at all, and then she would have spent the whole day at the kitchen table with both hands around a cup of coffee she wasn’t drinking, waiting for the door to open. She’d done enough of that for one lifetime.
They climbed over the barrier, and the old highway took them in.
The air changed on the other side. That was the thing nobody would have believed if he’d tried to explain it. One step past the concrete and the temperature dropped; the sounds of the new highway thinned away to nothing. The fog curled around their feet like a cold breath.
Somewhere down the old road past this junction was where the accident happened. Nobody in town talked about it.
But Parker remembered it. He remembered it every time he heard metal scrape or glass break. He remembered it in the shower when the water ran cold. He remembered it every time a school bus passed him on the street, yellow and ordinary, packed with students who had no clue how fast a normal day could flip over.
Everyone survived. Everyone except Sam, and Sam was never found.
The official report said Sam had been thrown out the emergency exit and swept away by Bow Creek. Parker had never believed it. Sam once spent an entire night alone in the woods behind Parker’s house to prove he could, and came back at dawn grinning, with a story about an owl that landed close enough to touch.
And Sam knew water. The summer they were nine, he taught Parker how to ride the rapids at the creek in a blow-up raft. Never fight the water, Sam said, spitting a stream of creek water through the gap in his front teeth. You fight it, you lose. You ride it, you win.
Sam didn’t lose.
“You’re doing the quiet thing,” Maya said, falling into step beside him. She wore a knitted hat pulled down over her ears, and her breath puffed out in little clouds. He was surprised he found it cute.
“You’re doing the ‘staring-into-the-fog’ thing,” he said.
“Just thinking,” she replied, taking in the crisp air.
“I figured.”
Maya knew not to push it. She didn’t have to. She had been on the bus that day too, four rows back. She’d walked away with eleven stitches in her arm and a fear of curvy roads she still wouldn’t admit to. She knew what today was. She also knew what was riding in Parker’s backpack, wrapped in damp newspaper: a little oak sapling, grown from an acorn off the big tree behind his house. The tree he and Sam had camped under every summer since forever.
The sapling was eight inches tall and had exactly eleven leaves. Parker had counted them that morning while he wrapped the root ball, because counting was easier than thinking about what the tree was for. It had spent a year on his windowsill in a milk carton, leaning toward the light, refusing to die through two cold snaps and one week when he’d forgotten to water it. It was, he had decided, a very Sam-kind of tree.
The plan was simple. Walk the old road end to end, start to finish, the whole thing Sam had always wanted to do. Find the right spot, somewhere with a view, somewhere Sam would have picked. Plant the tree. Say goodbye. Come out the other side by five, where Cole would be waiting.
The hike had been Maya’s idea. Three months before, in the library, she’d slid a note across the table while they were supposed to be studying for a math test. The anniversary is coming. We should do something real this time. Not the gym assembly. Not the moment of silence. Something HIS.
Parker had stared at the note a long time. Then he wrote back one word. Where?
Maya wrote back: You already know where.
The old highway. Sam’s favorite road in the world. He’d checked out library books about it. He’d printed maps of it. A whole abandoned highway, three miles long, with nobody on it? To Sam that wasn’t creepy. That was a treasure.
They walked. The road unrolled ahead of them through the mist, strange and quiet. The yellow center line still showed in places. Grass grew fat in the cracks. Little trees stood in the ditches where nobody had mowed in thirty years. On their left, Bow Creek slid along below the road, green and glassy, dropping into small waterfalls that filled the air with a soft, steady hiss. On their right, limestone bluffs went up in layers—sheer walls of pale rock, too steep for anything but ferns—streaked black where spring water leaked down them.
Somewhere off in the fog, a woodpecker went to work, knocked several times and quit—probably found what it was after. Their boots on the old asphalt sounded enormous.
For a while, neither of them talked. Parker caught himself listening for something, though he couldn’t have said what. The road was so quiet that whispering felt like the only polite option.
“I keep waiting for a car,” Maya said, whispering anyway. “Isn’t that dumb? Thirty years, nobody’s driven this thing, and I keep listening for a motor.”
“Sam used to say dead roads are the only honest ones,” Parker said. “No traffic. No signs bossing you around. Just the road, doing what roads do.”
“Which is what?”
“Going somewhere, I guess.”
Maya snorted a little laugh into the cold. After that, the quiet got easier to carry. The steady rhythm on the old pavement was like two heartbeats.
Sam would have loved every step of this. That was the exact thing that made every step hurt.
The road began to climb, doubling back on itself again and again up the shoulder of the ridge—switchbacks, Sam used to call them, a road too steep to go straight—and the fog thinned as they went. Then they came around a curve and the whole world opened up on their left.
Parker stopped without meaning to.
The Ozarks rolled away in every direction, ridge after ridge, deep green fading to blue and then to almost silver at the horizon. Down in the folds between them, creeks glinted. A red-tailed hawk hung in the air below the road. It was riding the wind coming up off the bluff, not even flapping.
The wind up here smelled like rain that hadn’t decided yet. Dogwood buds lit up the shadows under the taller trees. Parker could see the new highway on the far ridge, a thin scratch of guardrail with one tiny truck crawling along it, a whole busy world carrying on at a polite distance.
Sam used to say the mountains looked like a giant green quilt somebody had kicked to the bottom of the bed. Standing here, Parker could almost hear him say it.
“This might be the spot,” Maya said. She nodded at a grassy shelf just off the shoulder, where the view went on forever. “For the tree.”
“Maybe.” But Parker’s eyes had already drifted past it, down the slope. “Or farther on, there’s—”
He stopped.
“Parker? What is it?”
He didn’t answer right away. Below the high curve where they stood, the old road doubled back on itself. He could see a lower stretch of the same road lying in the haze, a gray ribbon a quarter mile down.
Something was standing on it.
A shape. A person. Standing on the cracked pavement, perfectly still, facing up the mountain. Facing him.
Parker’s heart slammed so hard he felt dizzy.
The figure was thin, with dark hair and narrow shoulders. And it was standing the way Sam used to stand, with that particular, unmistakable stillness, as if watching deer.
Sam. It looked like Sam.
Not the way strangers sometimes looked like Sam; a familiar haircut in a crowded store, a laugh from the next aisle over that made Parker’s stomach drop for nothing. This was the tilt of the head. The set of the shoulders. The figure’s chin came up a little, like it had heard Parker’s heartbeat from a quarter mile off. For half a second, Parker saw a pale, familiar face.
The fog slid across the switchback, and the figure was gone. So was something else—low, quick, and black, sliding into the tree line without a sound. Parker would spend the whole hike almost convincing himself he’d imagined that part too.
“There was someone down there.” Parker’s hand shook as he pointed at the empty road. “Standing there. Maya, I swear I saw Sam.”
Maya’s face went careful and soft, that same gentle-but-worried look the school counselors used on him now. “Parker. It’s the anniversary. You’ve been thinking about him all week. Your brain might be—”
“I know what I saw.”
“Fog does weird things,” she said gently. “Shadows do too. You’ve been carrying this a long time.”
Parker closed his eyes. She was right. She had to be right, because the other option was too much. That Sam was alive. That he’d been out here the whole time, on this road, a few miles from home.
Hope like that could wreck a person. He’d watched it almost wreck his mom those first two weeks, every single time the phone rang. He’d watched it hollow out Sam’s mother month by month until the day the moving truck came. She’d hugged Parker on the sidewalk and whispered, Don’t you do what I did, honey. Don’t you spend your whole life listening for him. Then she drove to Tulsa to try and take her own advice.
He took a slow breath. “Yeah. Maybe.”
He didn’t believe it, though. Not even a little.
“Come on,” Maya said. “It’s a long road, and that switchback is on our way, anyhow. The road goes right down there. If somebody’s standing around on it, we’ll walk straight past them.”
She said it lightly. Neither of them smiled.
They started down. Parker kept his eyes on the spot where the figure had been, and he didn’t say the thing he was thinking.
Whoever it was hadn’t moved when they were spotted. Hadn’t waved, hadn’t hidden. It had just stood there, letting the fog close over it, like it had all the time in the world.
The mountain was patient as stone while the two of them walked the road along the top of its long humped back. It had been waiting on them.
Waiting for an entire year.