Chapter 1

ChapterOne

Shiloh

I stare downat the chipped blue nail polish on my toes as I walk out into the pasture, nothing but the sound of crickets chirping all around me, a stray bullfrog croaking in the distance. The sun is clawing at the horizon, trying to hang on for a few precious moments, but three steps later, it’s gone and dusk spreads like a shroud over the green, rolling pasture in the distance. As always, my destination is the Wanting Tree.

It’s out of place in the center of the pasture, a mighty oak reaching up to the sky, slightly gnarled and a little spooky. There is a hollow in the center of it that was its own universe when I was a child. Dark and mysterious. Now, at eighteen, I still hide inside sometimes and write stories in my notebook. Stories no one will ever see that take me out of this place. They take me far, far away. And I’ve never needed to get further away than I do right now.

I drop down onto the grass in my black funeral dress, leaning against the trunk of the oak and sliding my bare toes through the grass. Settling the notebook in my lap, I tilt my head back and sigh at the purple sky, thinking of my grandmother, who we laid to rest today.

Her final words still echo in my head.

Believe in the Wanting Tree, Shi.

Brow puckering, I doodle those words on a fresh page. My grandmother has been telling me about the same legend since my mother and I came to live with her ten years ago, freshly abandoned by my father. This is how the story goes: Once upon a time, a ranch hand was searching for his soul mate, convinced she was out there, just out of reach. He went to a fortune teller who revealed some bad news; the ranch hand’s lover didn’t exist in this time and place. They were star-crossed, living in different layers of existence. Heartbroken by the news, the ranch hand fit himself inside the hollow of the Wanting Tree and cried out for his unreachable love, only to vanish into the thin air.

My grandmother was convinced that the ranch hand time traveled to his soul mate, whichever plane she was existing on. And she knew the legend to be true, because she’d been standing in the pasture when the distraught man disappeared. Or so she said.

Believe in the Wanting Tree, Shi.

“I wish I could, Grandma,” I murmur, wondering if she can hear me. Hoping she can. Since she passed away a week ago, I’ve been talking to her often, the loneliness turning heavier and heavier in my breast. My mother works all hours as an emergency room nurse and even when she’s home, she’s haunted. Quiet. Sad. We barely speak. I had two friends, but their families have money and they’ve gone on graduation trips to Europe before college starts in the fall. I’m well and truly alone now.

I’ve always managed to keep the lid sealed on my deepest wants, but the solitude is twisting that lid around, slowly, slowly, and now I’m breathing faster into the cooling night air, tightening my fingers around the pen in my hand until the barrel digs into my palm painfully. The Wanting Tree tends to make me feel this way, like I’m missing something important just beyond my consciousness.

“I want my person,” I whisper, even though I feel silly. There is no such thing as a magic tree, even if the person I loved most in the world believed the lore. “Where is my person?”

Everyone else seems to have one. A best friend. A soulmate.

The world is made up of pairs, but I seem destined to remain solo. The daydreamer in the back of class with knockoff shoes and a slight overbite. I feel like an alien most of the time. Like I crash-landed here and I’m still trying to learn ways to fit in, so no one finds out I’m an alternate life form. Sometimes, before I graduated, I would sit in the middle of the cafeteria and this scream would build and build in my throat until I was positive it would shatter the windows if I let it out. There is something heavy and pressurized and urgent inside of me that has no name—and it hums the loudest at the Wanting Tree.

“I want my person,” I say again, louder, the crickets chirping like backup singers.

My eyes are half closed when a golden shimmer swoops in the air, but when I sit up straighter and search left and right for the source, there is nothing. However, the ground is growing warm beneath me, the tree feeling larger than usual against my spine…and suddenly that urgency that has always existed inside of me…it grows stronger. Louder.

I’m missing someone. I’m missing part of myself. I know it.

He’s out there. He’s out there. He’s out there.

Every time I look to the horizon, I feel that truth like a hot iron on my chest.

I’m in the wrong place. Or he is. Or both. I don’t know where the certainty comes from, only that it’s enormous and it won’t leave me alone. It’s a daily presence.

“I want him found. Now.” I drag in a breath, scream-whispering, “Now.”

The pasture seems to rise around me, preparing to swallow me whole, the chirp of the crickets growing deafening. My notebook is small now. Far away. I drop it out of fear and crawl on hands and knees into the hollow of the Wanting Tree, wrapping my arms around my knees and hugging them to my chest.

That’s when I hear the voice—and the earth’s rotation seems to stop on a dime.

Life just…pauses.

It’s a young man’s voice. As if it’s coming from a great distance away. From beyond the darkness of the hollow. It’s deep and twangy. Full of Kentucky. I can’t make out what he’s saying. The words come and go. Loud and soft. Gone for a few seconds, then back. But I’m holding my breath, yearning to hear every single syllable. I’m electrified by the voice.

“Hello?” I call back, moving to a kneeling position, flattening my palms on the inside of the tree, part of me wondering if I’m having an extreme response to grief. “Is someone there?”

All I hear is a rapid intake of breath. Is that me?

Or someone else?

“Hello?” I try again.

“Hold on.” The voice ebbs in and out. “Hold on.”

A whimper of disbelief leaves me, moisture coasting down my cheeks. This can’t be happening. I’m hearing things. I’m projecting this magic because I want to hold on to this last piece of my grandmother. Right?

No, the golden shimmer is back, just outside of the hollow, the ground trembling beneath my knees. Then sound of swarming locusts grows so loud, I have to slap my hands over my ears, cowering into the heart of the tree. My heart pounds like the hooves of our stallion on fresh packed dirt and there’s a sense of an impending homecoming that I’m almost too scared to believe. To hope for.

As suddenly as it started, the noise stops.

Impenetrable silence falls.

Slowly, I lower my hands from my ears and crawl on hands and knees out of the hollow, looking around, half expecting the ranch to be gone, carried away on the wind. But everything is exactly like it was before.

Except for the shirtless man lying thirty yards away in the grass, a dusty white cowboy hat clutched between his fingers.

No.

No way.

I’m seeing things. It’s probably some trick of the light. A bale of hay positioned at just the right angle. I’ll just go over there, confirm it’s an inanimate object and go to bed, because obviously I need some sleep.

But just as I’m crawling out of the hollow into the grass, the man sits up and looks at me.

And the impact of his eyes is like a battering ram to my heart.

I gulp down a sob, tingles racing from the crown of my head to my fingertips.

I can’t breathe. I can’t…breathe.

I’ve never seen him before, yet somehow he’s familiar. His dark unruly hair and piercing gaze that is soulful and…humorous all at once. He must be a lot older than me, because he’s built like a man, unlike the boys I graduated with. They’re much smaller, softer, while this guy has dirt and chest hair and muscles and all of it fits him. He’s grown into himself. He wears confidence like a cloak. He’s also very curious about me, slowly climbing to his feet, his full height of well over six feet—and he slaps his cowboy hat against his powerful thigh.

“Well, hot damn,” he says in a southern rasp. “Aren’t you a beautiful sight?”