CHAPTER 1 JAIME

Nothing good ever happened in Saint Juniper, Vermont. Okay, that might have been a little dramatic. Nothing good ever happened to me in Saint Juniper, and if I’d had to bet on it, nothing ever would. Maybe I didn’t have the authority to make a sweeping statement about a place I barely remembered, but hey, lack of common sense had never stopped me before. For years, Saint Juniper had only existed inside my head as a sort of a fever dream—a tourist trap nestled neatly between the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains, seemingly staged for the sole purpose of producing exceptionally charming postcards. Everything about it felt suffocating, except for the vast forest and craggy peaks that formed a massive valley on the north side of town.

I didn’t remember much of anything else, but I didn’t think it mattered. As far as I was concerned, the odds I’d ever go back to my hometown were near zero. But when the summer before my senior year came barreling into my life, the universe and the Vermont Department for Children and Families had other plans for me. One flight and two bus rides later, I was unceremoniously dumped back into a past I had spent the better part of eight years trying to forget.

I’d set my expectations comfortably low, but I did have one goal when I came back to Saint Juniper: I wanted a fresh start. This was my last shot to get things right before I turned eighteen.

I didn’t want to mess things up with my newly assigned legal guardian before I had the chance to unpack the single trash bag full of belongings I’d salvaged from my cross-country foster-care extravaganza of a childhood.

But the second I stepped onto Saint Juniper soil, I realized I was screwed.

It was like if a picture book about Colonial America and Children of the Corn had a baby. There was one elementary school, one high school, and one grocery store, all within walking distance of the town center, with its little brick sidewalks and candy-striped awnings. Every neighborhood was lined with white picket fences and two-hundred-year-old oak trees that probably had more laws protecting them than I had protecting me. I was 80 percent convinced that the adults in Saint Juniper had been beamed in by aliens or planted by the government, because I refused to believe that anyone would live here of their own free will.

And then there was the gossip. I’d lived in enough small towns to know that my entire existence would become a public spectacle. But Saint Juniper wasn’t like other small towns. It was worse. I thought I’d be able to enjoy a few days of anonymity, but when I ventured out to Main Street for the first time after my move, I realized that everyone had already gotten the memo about me. The cashier at the corner store held the twenty-dollar bill I gave him up to the light, and the woman bagging my groceries leveled a scowl at me that said she already knew my entire life story. Anywhere else, dirty looks could have been about anything from the way I dressed to the color of my skin. It had never been a cakewalk, and I’d learned to shrug it off as best as I could. But in Saint Juniper, it was impossible not to wonder if the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair bagging my groceries remembered me from when I was a kid, or if the clerk at town hall had known my mom before I came into the picture. Every sidelong heavy-withjudgment glance carried the extra weight of possible recognition, or worse, pity.

After only two weeks in town, my nerves had practically rubbed themselves raw. I felt trapped, and I found myself—not for the first, the tenth, or even the hundredth time in my life— daydreaming about running away. But I wasn’t thinking about some far-off city where nobody knew my name or my face or the people who had given both of them to me. I was thinking about the valley. Because in the back of my mind, there was a persistent drumbeat telling me I would be safe in the woods. That something was out there to meet me on the other side.

I got the final push I needed when I stopped by Maple City Diner one night. The waitress knew which takeout order was mine before I could give her my name, and two women at the counter fell silent the second they noticed me.

“Oh, you look just like Samantha,” one of them said. It felt like all the oxygen was sucked out of the room as she turned to her friend. “Doesn’t he look just like her?”

The other woman nodded. “Totally. You have her eyes. Shame about the way things ended up. We all thought Sammie was going to do such amazing things. And then, well—”

The door shut behind me before she could finish, my order still sitting on the counter. I walked out of the restaurant and down the street, not caring where I was going. I didn’t want to be seen. I wanted to disappear. So even when the sun set beyond the pines, when the sidewalk gave way to grass and the grass gave way to the forest floor, I kept walking.

I couldn’t help but wonder if my biggest mistake was wanting too much—from Saint Juniper, from my ridiculous pipe dream of a fresh start. I wanted so badly to have a future that didn’t look exactly like what everyone else expected it to be. I didn’t want to be another foster kid who fell off the map, who never got to be happy. But maybe I was better off alone, out of sight and out of mind. After all, who would really care if a person like me walked into Saint Juniper’s Folly and never came back?