The Box in the Woods (Truly Devious #4)(69)

She rested next to him, tucking her head into his shoulder. He rolled toward her, and his lips were on hers.

If it was bad form to make out in the spot that Allison Abbott had fallen from, Stevie tried not to dwell on it. There was a rush to the moment, as if something pent-up was being expressed, and David rolled on top of her, and then she on





him. They were more or less on the public path, but they were also alone with the woods and the sky. Soon they both had pine needles in their hair and were breathless. Then, as suddenly as the kissing began, it stopped. He smiled again, a questioning smile, and balanced himself up on his elbows.

“So,” David said. “Fall. School.”

He was back to whatever conversation he had started that morning when they left Susan’s house.

“Fall,” she repeated. “School.”

“You’re going back to Ellingham. I am a man without a plan at the moment.”

“I thought you were going to keep working with the group you work with now,” she said.

“That was my plan, yeah . . . but something’s come up. I’ve been offered something.”

She sat up as well.

“There’s someone who’s known me since I was little,” he said, looking at the ground between them. “He doesn’t like my dad—not a lot of people who know him do. He got in touch because he suspected that I had something to do with my dad’s fall from grace, and he knows that I’ve been cut off. He offered to help me out.”

“With money?”

“Kind of. More like with a future. He guessed, correctly, that it can be hard to be related to my dad and be in America sometimes. He has connections in England. He’s offered to make some calls and get me into a program at a university in England and would help cover the costs.”





Stevie blinked. Maybe it was the heat, or the rush of events, but her brain was not making a picture of the words coming out of David’s mouth.


“England?” she said.

“England,” he repeated. A nervous flicker flashed across his features.

“For school?”

“For school.”

“So what did you say?” she asked.

“I said I would think it over. I have to get back to them soon, though. Definitely by this week.”

Something Stevie had learned about herself in the months that she had been in some kind of relationship with David was this: she didn’t take emotionally taxing conversations well. It didn’t take much for her to spiral. She went from feeling completely connected to him and swimming in the warm waters of happy hormones, to a cold, frightened feeling. She had just gotten David back, and now he was going again, farther than before.

“So you’re saying this now?” she asked. “After a woman I met fell off a cliff?”

“That wasn’t my plan,” he said, a little archly. “I’ve been trying to tell you since I got here. It’s never the right time with you. I’m going to have to go soon, so . . .”

“So you’re dropping this news and leaving?”

“Stevie,” he said, a flinty edge coming into his voice, “I came out here as soon as I could. I’m trying to—”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” she said, even though





she had absolutely no idea what he was trying to do, or even what that meant. That’s the thing about speaking—you can talk and talk and have no idea at all what the words leaving your mouth mean, or where they came from.

“This is an opportunity,” he said. “I need to talk about it, think about it.”

“What’s there to think about?” she said. “It would be terrible if you had to pay for school like a normal person.”

He pushed himself up to his hands and stretched his arms long behind him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Like a normal person.”

The air between them chilled.

Stevie didn’t want to be saying what she was saying. She only sort of meant it. It wasn’t his fault that someone had offered to pay for his school, or that he could take it or leave it. At the same time, it wasn’t exactly fair that, once again, David had the world handed to him on a silver platter. People like David didn’t have to make their own luck. It was fair to bet that no one was going to offer Stevie a free ride to school in England, and she’d solved a murder.

It also meant he might be going far away, and just when they were happy. Was there some kind of law that said things couldn’t go well between them?

“I can’t deal with this right now,” she said, pushing herself up from the ground.

Shut up, Stevie, shut up, stop talking like you’re in a reality show. . . .

“I’m sorry things can’t always follow your schedule,” he





snapped back, starting to match her tone.

She was walking away, and she didn’t even know why. She was crying. She walked faster, then she jogged, then she stopped jogging because she still was no good at running. Overhead, the sky continued to darken quickly, turning a kind of green color.

At some point, as she was reaching the road that divided the park with Sunny Pines, she decided to turn back. But that was also the moment the sky decided to open up, and in short order, it began to hail. Stevie had to run with all her might to get back under cover at the entrance of the camp, then dodge from building to building to reach her cabin.