The Girl Who Chased the Moon

That finally drew her up short. She stared at him in the shadow. “How many times have you come up here?”

“A few.”

She suddenly thought back to the day she’d arrived in Mullaby. “The day I arrived, my bracelet on the table…”

“I knew you were coming in that day,” he said. “I was curious about you. I found the bracelet on the front walk.”

“You don’t have to sneak in here anymore,” she said. “Everything’s out in the open now, right?”

His answer was to step into the light in front of her, so close they almost touched.

Nothing happened at first. But then, like it was growing so hot it became white, the glow around him started to blaze. She looked up at him and he was watching her closely.

“I lied,” she whispered.

He looked concerned and started to step back. “About what?”

She reached out and stopped him. “About forgetting what you looked like. I could never forget this. I will never forget this,” she said. “Not in all my life.”

He smiled and took her face in his hands.

Then he finally kissed her.

Chapter 16

Maddie Davis adjusted the backpack on her shoulder as she walked down the sidewalk. She’d arrived in Mullaby yesterday and was staying at the Inn on Main Street. Her parents had arranged it. She’d wanted to do this alone, but she understood that her parents were worried, and if paying for her stay at a swanky inn made them feel better, then she would suffer through it and diligently eat the chocolate put on her pillow every night.

She hadn’t slept well the night before. The full moon had poured through the window in her room, and she’d spent most of the night curled up in a chair, staring at the park across the street from the inn. At breakfast, the innkeeper had told her that the full moon in August was called the Sturgeon Moon. It made people restless, she’d said, like there was too much to do, too many fish to catch.

After breakfast, Maddie had talked to her mom and had tried to keep it light. But her mother had still sounded nervous. “Maybe my sarcasm will finally be explained,” Maddie had joked. “Maybe it’s simply hardwired. That means it’s not your fault.” Her mother hadn’t laughed. Maddie should have known. Her parents were the kindest people she knew, but they didn’t share Maddie’s sense of humor. She’d learned early on to temper her smart mouth around them.

It was a perfect, sunny Monday morning. As Maddie walked, she took a deep breath of the tangy-sweet air and her shoulders relaxed a little. She liked this town. It reminded her of something she couldn’t quite place.

She saw the sign hanging over the door ahead.

J’S BARBECUE.

For some reason, she stopped. Her feet simply wouldn’t move. The people behind her had to break around her as they walked past.

She’d thought about doing this for years, and it was time. But she’d tried to downplay the seriousness of the event by blocking out only a few days to do it. She’d sandwiched it between the end of her summer internship at her father’s law firm and her first day back at school at Georgetown for her sophomore year. But now that it was really going to happen, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go through with it. What was it really going to accomplish? She had a great relationship with her adoptive parents. And she already knew enough about her birth mother to piece together why she’d given Maddie up for adoption. Julia Winterson had been sixteen and a student at Collier Reformatory, a now-defunct institution that had been groundbreaking at the time, a boarding school for troubled girls. It had closed down a few years ago because of budget cuts. Julia now lived in a small barbecue town in North Carolina and owned a restaurant She’d never married. Never had more kids. The private investigator her parents had hired on Maddie’s behalf had even supplied a photo of Julia. She was pretty and fresh, but with a faraway look in her dark eyes. Maddie, with her blond hair and blue eyes, didn’t look much like her, except maybe a little around the mouth. She figured she must take after her birth father, whoever he was. His name wasn’t on her birth certificate. That was one thing only Julia could tell her.

She started walking again, but her heart was racing. She could hear it in her ears. She was almost to the large front window of the restaurant when she stopped again, this time collapsing back against the brick facade of the building. She set her backpack by her feet and covered her eyes with the palms of her hands.

Don’t be a wuss, she told herself.

She let her hands fall to her sides.

When she opened her eyes again, she saw that she was standing opposite two teenagers sitting on a bench outside the restaurant. The girl had quirky flyaway hair and was dressed in shorts and a tank top. The young man was in a white linen suit and red bow tie. They were leaning in toward each other, their foreheads almost touching, and the guy had the girl’s hand in his, slowly rubbing his thumb over her wrist. They were in their own world. The prince and princess of their own kingdom. It made Maddie smile.

They both looked up when the door to the restaurant opened. Maddie turned her head, her eyes widening. The elderly man walking out had to duck under the doorway to get out. She’d never seen someone so tall.

The teenagers stood when they saw him. The giant walked over to them with an awkward, stiff-legged gait. The young man held out his hand and the giant shook it. They said a few words, laughed at something, then the guy in the white suit turned and walked down the sidewalk.

When he passed Maddie, he smiled slightly and gave her a polite nod. She watched him walk away, then turned back to the giant and the girl. The giant handed the girl a paper bag. She took it and together they walked down the sidewalk. Maddie craned her head to look up at him as he passed.

She felt like she was in some strange fairy tale, like she’d just dropped into the ending of a story.

The door to the restaurant opened again and two men walked out. Silver sparkles from inside caught in the air and rolled in the wind past her. She took a deep breath, and it made her stand up straighter. Sugar and vanilla and butter. That relentless scent had been following her around all her life. Sometimes she could see it, like this, but most of the time she ju st felt it. When she was a kid, she could be sitting in class at school, or walking her dog Chester, or in the middle of a dreary violin lesson with her older brother, and the smell would suddenly appear out of nowhere and make her inexplicably restless. Even now, sometimes she would wake up at night and swear someone was baking a cake in the house. Her roommates thought she was crazy.

It was the familiarity of the smell that gave her the courage to pick up her backpack and walk to the window and look inside the restaurant. It was a plain, nondescript place, but packed.

Maddie’s eyes went to a woman behind the counter right away. There she was.

Julia Winterson.

The woman who’d given birth to her.

She was smiling, talking to a handsome man with blond hair sitting on the other side of the counter. Maddie had spent countless hours staring at the photograph from the private investigator. In real life Julia looked happier, more settled.

Maddie kept her eyes on her through the window as she slowly walked to the door. When she reached the door, she saw that there was a flyer taped to it that read:

Blue-Eyed Girl Cakes:

Specialty cakes for any occasion. Inquire within .

Someone else walked out and, seeing her, held the door for her.