Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
I’m not sure which is to blame for waking me from my dream first: the nonstop knocking or the intense fruity scent assaulting my nostrils.

“Are you burning a spiced cranberry?” my mom asks from the other side of my bedroom door. After working in our candle store downstairs as long as she has, my mom can smell a lit wick a mile away—and probably describe the candle’s label in surprising detail too.

I sit up, push off my blankets, and yawn out a long, “Huuuh?”

“You fell asleep with a candle burning again,” she says with more urgency, “didn’t you?”

“No,” I say, but as I blink away the blurriness from my eyes and take another breath in, I realize that the evidence is not on my side.

I spring up and dash to my desk, but my lips are still curving into the shape of an O inches from the flame when my mom opens the door and exposes my lie. I exhale a quick burst of air and put the candle out of its misery. “Sorry,” I say sheepishly as a stream of smoke floats up from the wick.

She sighs. “Was it burning all night?”

“Maybe?” I cringe. “I don’t know.”

Really, though, I don’t. I can’t remember lighting the candle before going to bed, but unless a stranger broke into our second-story apartment with the sole purpose of making my bedroom smell like cranberries, I’m suspect number one.

My mom, clearly frustrated with her one and only child, leans against the doorframe and glares at me from behind her neon-blue glasses. This isn’t the first time that I’ve come a little too close to burning down our building, and I cannot say with confidence it’ll be the last. But I try anyway. “I’ll never light a candle before bed again.”

She lets out a doubtful laugh and folds her arms against her chest. She’s already done up to go to work downstairs, with her wavy hair pulled back neatly and my dad’s old checkered cardigan draped around her shoulders. He’s an average-sized guy, but it still looks three sizes too big on her. She’s wearing it because it’s soft and cozy, I’m sure, not because it reminds her of her missing soon-to-be ex-husband.

My mom picks up the blackened candle, her fingers carefully avoiding the hottest parts of the glass. “No more of these in here, kid, that’s for sure.”

Most sixteen-year-olds get their gaming or phone privileges revoked when they’ve done something wrong. I get new restrictions placed on my candle-burning habit.

And honestly? “That’s fair,” I concur.

The scowl on her face shifts into a mischievous grin. “Hey,” she whispers, “today’s the day, remember?”

I… do not. Why is it the day?

It’s the start of fall break, which is nice. But my week off from school is hardly something that would spark this level of giddiness from my mom. It can’t be her birthday, either, because she shares it with America. So as long as there aren’t fireworks bursting outside and a U.S.-flag-meets-birthday cake getting frosted in the kitchen, I know I haven’t forgotten it. What else could she be talking about?

Considering I’m still waking up and probably blanking on the obvious answer, I just nod and return the smile, hoping to avoid strike number two before the day has even begun.

“Get dressed and come down soon, okay?” she says, disappearing into the hallway with my cranberry candle. “And don’t straggle, please!”

A moment later I hear the jingling of keys and the front door of our apartment swinging open, then closed. My eyes quickly find the calendar that I’ve been using to track the countdown to our candle store’s busiest weekend of the year and look at today, trying to figure out what I’m forgetting. But all I see is that in just a few days, a barrage of bougie Michiganders from downstate will flood Crimson to stroll beneath the reddest maple trees they’ve ever seen with their hot ciders and disposable incomes in hand. The town’s fall colors lure thousands up to our street festival every October to blow their budgets on knitted scarves, cinnamon donuts, and, at our store, the perfect candle for the season.

I look forward to Red Fest each fall, but this year’s will be more complicated—unless I can find my dad. He vanished without a trace too long ago for something not to be wrong. I plop down into my chair and tear my eyes away from the calendar. They fall on my camera, which I haven’t used since Dad disappeared.

I open my photography album, and sure enough the latest pics I see are the ones I took at Sleeping Bear Dunes with my dad days before his disappearance about six months ago. He’s not in most of them—I prefer photographing landscapes over people—but he doesn’t need to be for me to recall the memories. I tap further into the past and see more evidence of our adventures: Point Betsie Lighthouse last spring and the trail we took in Manistee National Forest a few weeks before that. In a weird way, it feels like they all could’ve been snapped yesterday. That may be in part due to the lack of leads surfaced by the apathetic Crimson Police, though. Judging by how little progress they’ve made on his case, you’d be forgiven for assuming he went missing only hours ago.

Nothing is the same without him, but Red Fest without him? That’s unthinkable. Dad cuts the ribbon to celebrate the start of the festival each year, so I’m hoping there’s a renewed push to find him now that it’s around the corner and on everyone’s mind.

I hear banging on the front door. My face scrunches in confusion, and I leave my room and cross our apartment, racking my brain over who it could be.

When I open the door, two guys and a girl who all look slightly older than me are standing on the doorstep surrounded by luggage.

“Hello,” the guy in the middle says. He’s tall and skinny with a messy nest of red hair sprouting from his head and uncomfortably taut suspenders latched onto his waist. “I’m Clyde,” he says, before gesturing at the others, “and this is Buck and Ana.”

He looks at me as if their names should mean something.

But they don’t. So I just reply with, “Hi, I’m Caspen.”

He looks around nervously, seeming to catch on that I’m clueless. “Is Katy home?”

Okay, so he knows my mom, but that still doesn’t explain the luggage. “Can I ask what this is about?”

“We made it,” Buck says, as if the importance of their arrival should be obvious.

Then Ana adds with a grin, “We’re home.”