2025-06-05 06:19:55Jake snatched a piece of bread and shoved it into his mouth, crumbs spilling everywhere.
Greg laughed from across the room. “Look at the dog eating!”
Jake’s throat tightened. He didn’t respond. He just swallowed hard and stumbled out the door.
The morning sun hit Jake’s face, making it turn red. Crumbs were still on his shirt.
Amanda walked out with her purse swinging.
“Let’s go, Jake,” she said sharply. “Don’t slow me down.” Her cold tone hurt more than Diane’s stare. Jake followed behind her, head down, feeling like a stray dog walking after its owner.
At the market, Amanda gave him heavy bags filled with fruit and meat. “Carry these, Jake,” she said. People stared and whispered, “Is that her servant?” Jake’s arms hurt, but he said nothing. Amanda rolled her eyes. “You’re useless, but at least you are here.”
Jake’s face squeezed, he couldn't wait to get over with his plans, but when would that be?
Amanda got some apples and threw them at Jake “Catch, loser,” she said, laughing as it hit Jake’s chest.
The people nearby giggled, their pity was worse than their laughs. Jake bent down to pick up the apple, his hands shaking. Then manda snapped, “Stop embarrassing me, Jake.”
On their way home, they stopped by a luxurious boutique for Amanda to get some bags.
At the luxurious boutique, the glass doors and shiny counters screamed money.
Amanda walked in confidently, her heels clicking on the floor, while Jake followed behind in his old, worn-out shirt.
“Hold these,” she said, tossing him a pile of shopping bags. She looked at his clothes with pity.
You could never afford any of this, Jake.”
Jake’s arms hurt from carrying the heavy bags. Amanda picked up a Louis Vuitton purse and shook her head.
“This is real class,” she said with a cold voice. “Something you’d never understand.”
He saw his chance, to prompt her that he wasn't that poor Jake anymore. “Louis Vuitton’s outdated,” Jake said, loud and clear, “Hermès Birkin’s the trend now.”
Amanda froze, her eyes narrowing. “Since when do you know fashion?” she asked, voice curiously. Jake’s ego swelled, he’d caught her off guard, shown he wasn’t just “poor Jake” for a moment.
Her doubt didn’t last. Amanda scoffed, “Don’t act like you’re somebody, Jake.” she said, paid and left the boutique building, walking to her lambo, Jake followed behind, calm and quiet.
She hadn’t really said a word since that Birkin line slipped out of his mouth, he definitely felt it.
The way her brows had been moving and her brief pause Jakes knew she was thinking.
Amanda didn’t say a word until they reached the parking lot. Her Lamborghini glistened in the sun.
She turned to Jake, her eyes squinting.
“Seriously… how do you know about Hermès? That’s not something broke boys know about.”
Jake smirked. “I’ve seen a few in pawn shops.”
Amanda rolled her eyes. “You? In a pawn shop? You’d be lucky to afford one of the plastic bags.”
Then Jake’s phone ranged. Not his usual deadbeat burner phone, but a new one, sleek, silent, and expensive-looking.
Amanda’s eyes widened immediately. “Whose phone is that?”
Jake didn’t answer. He just stepped to the side and answered it calmly.
His voice went low, like he didn't want anyone to hear him.
“Yeah… go ahead with the acquisition. Make sure the holding company is registered under the Dubai office... No, delay the press release. I want NDAs signed first. If the board gives pushback, remind them who kept them afloat last quarter.”
Amanda froze as she eavesdropped on Jake's call.
Jake didn’t sound like a cleaner. Or a loser. It sounded like someone used to being obeyed.
“And send the prototype to Chicago—I want to see it in person before we greenlight manufacturing and shipping.”
He hung up and turned to Amanda casually, as if nothing had happened.
She blinked. “What… was that?”
Jake shrugged. “A friend. He talks too much.”
Amanda’s lips parted slightly. Her eyes scanned him like she was seeing something new.
“…What kind of friend talks like that?”
Jake chuckled, opening the door to his battered Honda. “The kind you meet in pawn shops.”
Amanda roared off in her Lamborghini, leaving a cloud of dust behind Jake.
At the house, Amanda carried her shopping bags herself.
She rushed into her room, like she was being chased. “Something happened while we were at the market,” she said sharply, eyes serious. “I want to talk. You and Mum — come with me to Mum’s room.”
Ethan frowned. “What’s going on?”
Amanda tossed the bags on the bed and marched out. Ethan quickly followed, jeans half-zipped in a rush.
She locked the door behind them, glancing over her shoulder. “Especially no one is to follow. Jake, don’t let him hear this.”
Ethan leaned in, confused. “Why the secrecy?”
Amanda’s voice dropped low. “I heard Jake making a call. Not just any call.”
Her mother, Diane, sighed, unimpressed. “So? Everyone makes calls.”
Amanda shook her head. “No, Mum. It wasn’t normal. His voice… he sounded like a man who owns the whole of Chicago.”
Ethan’s eyes widened. “You mean, like, he’s more than just some loser?”
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Chapter Six Hundred and Thirty
A hundred and fifty years after Jake Sullivan walked into the river, the canyon woke to find Jake’s apple waiting on the bare ground as it always did (perfect, red, warm).Only this year the apple was split cleanly in half, as though someone had taken one deliberate bite and set the rest back down.No one had touched it. No child had been brave enough. No elder had been curious enough.The two halves lay side by side in the grass, juice still glistening, scent drifting across the square like a memory that refused to stay buried.By sunrise the entire settlement had gathered (five, maybe six thousand now, spread across both rims and down the river valley). They stood in a quiet circle the way their great-grandparents once had around a dying silver tree.Ember Sullivan (Asha’s granddaughter, ninety-one years old, hair the color of late snow, eyes still sharp enough to map a ridge by starlight) knelt and lifted one half of the apple.She did not hesitate.She bit.The taste rolled th
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty-Nine
Fifty-one years after Jake Sullivan was laid beneath the ordinary tree, the canyon celebrated its hundredth harvest festival.The tree (now two hundred feet tall, trunk thick as a house, roots sprawling across half the old cemetery) had become the heart of Defiance in every way. Children climbed it, lovers carved initials in its bark that vanished by morning, and every autumn it dropped Tomorrow apples by the wagonload. People no longer spoke of the silver tree except in stories told to wide-eyed young ones who thought the Maw was a dragon.Hope Sullivan died peacefully the winter before, at ninety-nine. They buried her beside her parents, and the tree dropped one perfect red apple onto her grave that never bruised, never rotted.That night, for the first time in a century, the tree spoke.Not in wind. Not in Jake’s recorded voice.It spoke aloud, in the canyon, in the dark, in a voice every soul from the oldest elder to the youngest child recognized instantly (rough, smoke-cured,
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty-Eight
They buried Jake Sullivan on the first day of autumn, when the cottonwoods were bleeding gold into the river and the air carried the first bite of winter.The whole canyon shut down. No school bells, no hammers on anvils, no children shouting in the square. Even the goats stood quiet in their pens. Thousands walked behind the litter of woven wildflowers and cedar boughs, but no one spoke above the hush of boots on dust and the soft creak of wagon wheels. The river itself seemed to lower its voice, as if it understood the weight of the man it had carried in life and was now carrying in death.Hope walked at the front, one hand resting on the edge of the litter, the other cradling the mended violin against her chest like a child. She was seventy-eight now (the same age Jake had been when he walked away), hair silver as moonlight on water, face carved deep by sun and grief and joy in equal measure. Her eyes were dry. She had cried every tear she owned the night the runners brought him
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty-Seven
Jake Sullivan was seventy-eight the year the Tree stopped giving.He noticed it before anyone else, because he still walked to the silver tree every dawn the way other men check the weather or their pulse. That morning the branches were bare, the fruit gone, the bark cold for the first time in fifty years.He stood there a long time, palm against the trunk, waiting for the familiar pulse of thirty-three thousand names.Nothing answered.He was not afraid.He was tired in a way that went past bone, past marrow, into the place where stories are born and end.He did not tell anyone what he felt. Not Hope, not Asha, not even the Tree itself. Some knowings are private, even from the people you love.Instead he went home, kissed Elara’s stone on the way past the cemetery, and began packing.A simple pack this time. One canteen. The knife he had carried since the Long Walk. The cracked violin Lilah had pressed into his hands the week before she died, saying, “You still owe me a song, o
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty-Six
It happened without warning, the way the best and worst things always do.One morning in late summer, the silver tree bore no fruit.Not a single luminous orb hung from its branches. The leaves were still perfect, still shimmering, still warm to the touch, but the harvest that had fed the canyon in body and memory for three generations simply failed to appear.At first no one worried. Trees have off years. The old-timers shrugged and said they’d eat regular apples and remember on their own.But the next morning the leaves began to fall.Not the gentle, one-per-year ritual leaves that never withered. These were ordinary leaves, silver turning dull, drifting down in silent thousands until the ground beneath the Tree looked like a moonlit snowfield.By the third day the trunk had gone cold.Asha (now thirty-three, mother of two, elected to the canyon council because someone had to be) stood beneath the bare branches with her daughter Ember and felt the same chill her great-grandfather Ja
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty-Five
Asha Sullivan was twelve the year the last person who had seen the Maw died.Old Marta (once Mrs. Guzman, once simply Marta, once no-name at all) slipped away in her sleep at ninety-four. She was the final living soul who could still describe the sky bleeding upward. They buried her beside the Memory Wall with a silver leaf tucked beneath her folded hands, and the canyon closed the circle.That spring, the schoolchildren asked Hope to tell them the story of the shadow one more time.Hope stood on the porch that had once belonged to her parents (now hers, though she still thought of it as theirs) and looked at thirty bright faces who had never known a night without stars they could trust.She told them the short version.“There was a darkness that tried to make us forget how to choose. We chose anyway. That’s all.”The children nodded solemnly, then immediately asked if they could use the trebuchet to launch watermelons instead of pumpkins this year. Hope said yes, because some lessons
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