Madeline Stone

Secrets

I’d known Derek Hastings my entire life, but never truly considered him until this moment. We first met when I was five and he was six, when his family moved into a brownstone just a few houses down from our own. We’d gotten along easily enough and found a mutual love for getting into trouble, whether it was cutting the hair off of his sister’s dolls, pouring ink into my mother’s tea, or hurling dirt clods at carriages as they drove down our street.