They walked. They walked a lot. The common strip behind the houses, the one with the gate at the back of my yard, runs all the way around the pond and connects to the bike path along Big Walnut Creek, and if you walk it at six in the morning on a Saturday, which is when Ottoline does her hour-long Saturday spin class at the gym on Route 37 without fail, nobody in Thistlewood sees you, because nobody in Thistlewood is awake. They walked to the creek and back. They talked about colleges. Hesper wants Case Western, for biomedical engineering. Dashiell wants Ohio State, or maybe Cincinnati, for actuarial science, which he had never told me, which made me feel something complicated in my chest. They split a thermos of hot chocolate. Once, in February, they saw a heron.
And they wrote notes. That was the jar in the fence. Hesper had found the loose knot years ago, when she was eight or nine, and had hidden things in it, a shiny rock, a fortune from a fortune cookie, and she had forgotten about it until the spring after the titration lab, when she pushed it out on a whim and left a note in a jam jar that said, in its entirety: Is this still here? Dashiell found it two days later because Pickle kept nosing at the hydrangea. He wrote back. They'd been writing back ever since. There were, Hesper estimated, about three hundred notes, and she had kept every one of his in a shoebox under a loose floorboard in her closet, because her mother did not check under floorboards, only phones.
"What do the notes say?" I asked, and they both looked at me in horror, and I put my hands up and said, "Never mind. Withdrawn. I don't want to know."
"Mostly calculus," Dashiell said.
"Some calculus," Hesper said.
Here is the part I want to be very clear about, because I know how people talk, and I know how a story with the word underwear in it gets passed around a neighborhood. Nothing in what those two told me that morning, nothing I learned later, nothing I saw, was anything other than what it looked like. They were two careful kids who held hands in the library and walked to a creek at dawn and split hot chocolate and wrote each other notes about integrals and colleges and herons. When I asked, as gently as I could, as a nurse and a mother, whether there was anything else I needed to know, Hesper looked me straight in the eye and said, "No, Mrs. Gilchrist. We're not in a hurry. We've been in a hurry about everything else. We decided not to be in a hurry about this." And Dashiell, scarlet to the tips of his ears, nodded so hard I thought he'd strain something.
I believed them. I still do.
The laundry started in August. That part Hesper told me in a lower voice, looking at the table.