Chapter Twenty-One
Cole Danby seems utterly at home in the woods. He stacks branches and gathers smaller vines with fluid, assured movements
that make Piper feel clumsy. She stumbles around the uneven, leaf-covered ground beside him, trying to distinguish what makes
one stick or branch usable and another not. And all the while, she feels guilty for running around with this strange guy,
even though it’s completely innocent. She wonders if the unsettled feeling is more about her relationship with Ethan than
any attraction to Cole Danby.
She checks her phone for messages and finds she had no reception. It’s hard to believe she kissed Ethan goodbye only yesterday.
Everything that happened before the weekend feels long ago, as if time itself had stretched and bent. Could anxiety have that
effect on her?
An occasional gust of wind sends the leaves fluttering all around them. If she were with Ethan, it would feel terribly romantic.
Her mind drifts into a brief fantasy of the two of them in those very woods, and he tells her to look under a tree branch
and there’s the ring box. He gets down on one knee and asks her to marry him. Or maybe they’re here on their honeymoon, like
Dove and Lexi. And they stroll through the woods holding hands and planning their future.
Then she feels stupid for letting thoughts like that detract from the arguably perfect day she’s having.
She and her mother are away on vacation, something they talked about but lately hadn’t made the time to actually do together.
She really wishes she hadn’t found the ring in the first place. It was messing with her head.
She checks her phone. No signal.
“Damn,” she mutters. Then, to Cole: “Does your phone work out here?”
“Yeah. But my grandfather takes our phones before every activity,” he says.
“So neither of us have a working phone?” She looks around, trying not to feel irrational panic.
“That’s the spirit of bushcraft, isn’t it? The whole point of you knitters venturing out of your safe little shell?”
“Forget I mentioned it,” she says. “No phone, no problem.”
After a minute, to redirect the conversation, she says, “Your grandfather seems like a character.” She scoops up a branch
shaped like a pitchfork.
“My entire family are characters. Not always in a good way.”
“Do you spend a lot of time with them?”
“Well, I see my grandfather mostly on holidays. But I see my dad all the time—we work together.” He tells her his father owns
a big grocery chain in Bucks County.
“Where’s that?” she asks.
He laughs. “Here. This is Bucks County. I grew up fifteen minutes from here in a place called Doylestown.”
Piper is distracted by something on the ground, a faint flicker of movement that catches her eye. She walks slowly in that
direction then bends down to look more closely. There, nestled in a shallow bunch of leaves, is a baby sparrow.
“You okay over there?” Cole calls out.
A few hatchlings had been brought into the shelter during the time she worked there, and she’d learned the first thing to do was check and see if the nest is nearby.
If so, it was best to place the baby back where its mother would return.
It was only a myth that an adult bird would sense the baby had been handled by humans and rejected.
“I found a baby bird.”
He hurries over and peers at the baby. It’s very still and one leg seems to jut out unnaturally.
“Is it injured?”
“I’m not sure,” Piper says. She wishes she knew enough to make some sort of determination about its condition.
Her love of animals had been intense and deeply ingrained since the time she was a small child. One of the few issues she
and her mother clashed over was having a pet. Maggie never wanted the responsibility, even though Piper insisted she’d help.
At six or seven years old, she didn’t understand that she couldn’t walk the dog or run to the store to pick up cat food. The
compromise was that Maggie sent her to a place called the Art Farm every summer, a day camp on East 93rd Street that had a
little indoor zoo. By the time she was a teenager, old enough to take care of a pet on her own, she was so busy with school
and jobs and friends she no longer pushed for it. Thoughts of veterinary school were replaced by accessible ambitions. That’s
when she started working at the Union Square Animal Shelter.
“Can you help me look for its nest?” she says.
They check the nearby tree branches, but don’t find anything. Cole pulls out a pair of binoculars.
“Impressively well-equipped,” she says.
“Well, what would a bushcrafter be without binoculars?”
“I can’t imagine,” she says dryly. “Your grandfather would be impressed.”
He spots something and points: The nest is very high up and out of reach. So that’s not an option.
“Is there a veterinary office or shelter nearby?”
“There’s a wildlife rehabilitation place in Chalfont,” he said. “Go get your car. I’ll wait here with the bird.”
“I can’t drive,” she says.
“What do you mean, you can’t drive?” he says.
“I’m from New York City.”
“And what—you thought you’d never step foot outside of it? So much for your survival skills,” he says.
She can’t argue with him on that. He offers to go get his truck, but she refuses to wait behind. “I’ll never find you.” She
dumps out her tote filled with twigs, bends down and lines the bottom with dried leaves, and slips the bird inside, making
sure to hold it loosely and open so it can get air.
“I have some banana boxes in the back of my truck,” he says.
Perfect.
It’s a ten-minute drive to the Bucks Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation, or BARR. Cole spent a lot of his childhood summers
at their camp, and she tells him about her summers at the Art Farm. “You’ll like this place,” he tells her.
Cole pulls the car up a long driveway that leads to a farmhouse-style building. A gravel parking lot winds around to an expanse
of horse stables and a field populated by wild turkeys. He walks around to the passenger door to help her get out of the car
with the bird box, then leads her up wood-plank stairs to a wraparound terrace. Inside the building, they’re met by a middle-aged
woman at a small table holding a small laptop and a few clipboards of paper. Shelves and bulletin boards display informational
flyers and cute photos of rescued animals.
“Hey, stranger,” the woman says, standing to give him a hug. “I thought I recognized your truck coming up the drive.”
Cole introduces Piper to the woman, Denise, and she hands over the bird box. Cole fills out paperwork on a clipboard, while Denise pulls on a latex glove and sets the box on the table. She cautiously opens the lid and gently retrieves the bird.
“Oh, aren’t you a cutie?” she said, giving it a quick once-over.
Piper’s heart feels full. There’s something so moving about holding a tiny, fragile thing like that. She wishes she could
stay and help.
“Can you . . . Is there a way to let us know what happens to her?” Piper said.
“Sure—we’re assigning her a case number. That’s it right there on the paperwork. Give us a day or so and feel free to call
and check in.”
Cole, noticing Piper’s reluctance to leave, offers to give her a tour of the place. The sounds of chirping, squeaking and
rustling come from distant rooms, and she hears the bustle of people moving around and talking, the ringing of a landline
phone. She’s curious to see more, but she realizes she should get back to her mother before she starts to worry.
“We should get back to our parents,” she says. She thanks Denise on her way back outside. Cole follows her.
“What’s the rush?” he says. “Let my dad and your mother run around trying to build a lean-to shelter. This was their big idea.”
True. And yet . . . “I feel like I’m ditching her.”
“You’re not ditching her. She found a friend her own age. It’s good for them. For both of them.”
They reach the truck and when they’re both back inside she asks, “What do you mean, good for them?”
He shrugs, starting the ignition. “Maybe there’s more going on here than a bushcraft challenge.”
Oh. Cole said the quiet part aloud. “That’s what I was thinking when I first heard about it. But I don’t know. I think we’re projecting.”
“Wishful thinking?” he says.
“Probably.”
“Well, maybe we can nudge them along.”
“How? Trust me, it’ll take a lot more than a weekend in the woods to get my mom interested in some guy. Especially when she
came here to spend it with me.”
“So give her the best of both worlds; come to our campout tonight.”
Is he flirting with her? And does she want him to be?
“I don’t like camping,” she says. It’s true. And also, she might not be thrilled with Ethan at the moment, but that doesn’t
mean she’d cheat on him. Even flirting with someone else feels wrong.
“What if our parents are hitting it off? Sometimes you gotta take one for the team.”
Maybe he’s right. What if they are? It’s bad enough Piper can’t take advantage of the setting and have a romantic weekend.
If Maggie can instead? Well, she’s all for it.