Chapter 11
As I no longer wanted to look at those two, I turned around and left the underground dungeon.
Waylon followed me upstairs. When I could no longer hold back my tears and collapsed crying, he hesitated for a moment before he pulled me into his arms and gently patted my back to comfort me.
Only after I finally calmed down did I realize how ambiguously intimate we were being.
I pulled away from his embrace, and while looking into his gentle gaze, another thought suddenly struck me.
“You just mentioned that I cried by the withered tree outside the city. How do you know about that?” I asked.
When I was young–whenever I was mistreated by my father and Mary–I would run to that tree outside the city to cry and confide in a boy who wore a wooden mask.
In turn, he would share with me the burdens of being weighed down by his father’s high expectations and the great pressure he felt.
We comforted each other and got through an otherwise joyless childhood together.
That was the secret hideout I had with the boy in the wooden mask. Only Jackson and I should have known about it, though. Unless…
A strange thought surfaced
my
mind. I stared at Waylon and blurted out our childhood code. “Where’s the acorn
“In the tree hollow,” Waylon replied.
Suddenly, in my mind, his eyes overlapped with the eyes of that masked boy f
Back then, we had agreed that
if v
ago.
were meeting the next night, we would place acorn in the tree hollow.
“It’s you!” I grasped Waylon’s hand excitedly. “You… You’re the boy with the wooden mask!”
