Leo— Dad got a call. New job, new state. We left an hour ago. I’m sorry I couldn’t say it in person. You’re not boring. You’re the least boring person I’ve ever met. Keep watching the sky. It’s the same everywhere. —Mira
Then came the last week of August. Leo was in the treehouse, waiting for her to show up with a stolen six-pack of root beer. She didn’t come. He waited an hour. Two. Finally, he walked across the field, his boots wet with evening dew.
Mira laughed. It was a real laugh, not a mean one. “You don’t talk to a lot of people, do you?”
He unfolded it. Her handwriting was small and rushed, as if she’d written it in the dark: the missing -2014-
He came down. His legs felt like stilts. By the time he reached her fence, his heart was a fist in his throat.
Mira was seventeen. She wore a leather jacket even in the heat and sat on her porch steps smoking thin cigarettes, blowing the smoke up at the sky like she was sending messages. Leo had never spoken to her, but he’d memorized the way she tucked her hair behind one ear, the way she laughed at her phone with her whole body.
Leo nearly fell out of the tree. He waved back, stiff as a flagpole. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “You gonna watch me all summer, or are you gonna come down?” Leo— Dad got a call
Years later, he’d tell people that 2014 was the summer he fell in love for the first time. And the summer he learned that some people aren't missing—they’ve just already left before you could ask them to stay.
One afternoon, she looked up—straight at the treehouse. Waved.
It was the summer of 2014, and Leo was fifteen, too old for the treehouse but too young to admit it. The treehouse sat at the edge of his uncle’s property, a plywood-and-nail cathedral built by cousins who’d long since grown up and moved away. Leo went there every day that July, not to play, but to watch. From that perch, he could see the whole dip of the valley—the old highway, the creek like a bent zipper, and the house across the field where a girl named Mira had just moved in. I’m sorry I couldn’t say it in person
“This time’s different,” she said, but her voice wavered.
“No,” he admitted.
“Good,” she said. “Then you won’t be boring.”
Leo read it seven times. Then he climbed back up to his perch and sat there until the stars came out. He didn’t cry. He just watched the empty house, waiting for a light that never turned on.