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“So she loved animals?”
“Yes, but she was allergic, so we never had any pets. I guess she’d have loved Shaggy.” He snorted as the bitter irony of that washed over him. “She never did any hands-on volunteering, but she did what she could. She probably latched onto the rainforest thing because volunteering didn’t actually require contact with dander, which made sense since she was so allergic. It was nothing like we did at the shelter.”
“What did she look like?”
Traffic thinned enough to actually move forward at a steady pace. He settled back in the seat and stared straight ahead. “Long blond hair. Blue eyes. Not bright like yours, though. Pale.”
“I bet she was really pretty.” There didn’t seem to be an undercurrent to the words. No tell me I’m pretty, too.
“Beautiful. Cancer never took that from her.” The familiar ache that invaded wasn’t its usual self. This time some of it belonged to the woman next to him, and he wished things could be different between them. He couldn’t hold on when that meant letting go, and regardless of where things went, they could only end one way. He might be wavering on his insistence that he was happy alone, but he sure as hell hadn’t budged on the prospect of good-bye.
There’d been enough of those.
Rue didn’t say anything else, and he wondered if she’d intentionally left him alone with his thoughts, or what she’d think if she knew the direction his thoughts had taken. That, of course, brought him back to Amy, who, oddly enough, was the reason Rue was now in his life.
“I’ve never talked about her,” he said. “Can you believe that? People ask how I’m doing, and the only thing I can ever say is I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to be fine, Ethan.”
“I wasn’t,” he said. “But I have been for a long time. The thing is, she’s gone, but she’s still my wife. How do I ever forget that?”
“You don’t ever forget it.”
The words came as a comfort. It wasn’t that he needed Rue’s vote to know his own mind, but it felt good to have someone on his side. It felt good to not feel alone.
“How far are we going?” he asked after a moment. He was asking about the drive, but realized after he’d spoken that he could have been talking about so much more. But if Rue picked up on that, she didn’t indicate it. Instead, she consulted her phone and gave him an exit number.
He realized he was in over his head the moment he saw the sign.
The woman was crazy. Batshit, apeshit, penguin shit crazy. “I am not going up in a hot air balloon.”
“Then let’s leave.”
He balked. He’d expected a fight, and she hadn’t batted an eyelash. “What?”
“You’re behind the wheel, Ethan,” she said gently.
Good grief. Of all the times not to argue. Was this why she let him drive?
“The choice is yours. Move forward or go back.” She’d ditched her sunglasses, so he had no problem seeing the utter lack of a challenge in her face. She wasn’t daring him. It was more of an invitation, although nothing close to normal. But then again, she hadn’t said anything about normal. She’d gone somewhere else.
New normal.
Massive understatement.
She was good; he’d give her that. But trusting their lives to a sack of air to… “Does forward have to be this?”
“No,” she said, the clear understanding in her eyes melting him. “It doesn’t.”
He swore under his breath, partly because she had a point and partly because that meant he was about to trust his life to a picnic basket dangling from a thin parachute full of hot air. “Let’s go.”
Unfortunately, they didn’t have to wait long. After he and Rue checked in, the ground team immediately started blowing air into the balloon, and just as quickly Ethan wished he’d averted his eyes.
“There are holes in that thing,” he muttered. “A lot of them.” The fireproof ring at the bottom sounded like a great idea, in theory, but it was barely attached to the rest of the balloon.
“Hey,” Rue called to the ground team. “How many people have plummeted to their deaths from this thing?”
