I gave it about another thirty seconds.
She started to shake.
"Easton."
"I know."
I pulled my fleece off over my head in one motion, the cold finding my arms before the fabric cleared my chin. She turned to say something. I didn't let her get to it—draping it around her shoulders, I hauled the front of it closed, and held it there until her hands came up to take over.
"Easton. You'll be cold."
"I won't."
"You're in a T-shirt."
"And you were in the lake."
She put her arms through the sleeves because she couldn't keep arguing and get warm at the same time. The fleece came down past her hips. The cuffs went past her hands. She pulled the sleeves down over her thumbs with the opposite hand, the same way she pulled her own sweaters at her kitchen counter at night.
"Don't make it a thing," she said.
"I'm not."
"Easton."
"I'm not, Astrid."
She looked at me then. Really looked. Honey-brown hair wet on one side, freckles I hadn't seen, eyes I'd known for fourteen years, and I was finding I didn't know at all. Something in my chest moved over and made room for that.
"Let's go home."
I picked up her pack off the gravel where she'd dropped it.
She watched me do it. She didn't argue.
I slung it over my shoulder with mine and clipped the leashes back on the dogs. Penny was where I'd left her, tied to the maple at the top of the slope, sitting on her haunches with the patient,unimpressed expression of an old dog who had been very clear about her objection and had been overruled. I bent and untied her, scratched behind her ear, and told her she was a good girl. She huffed at me because she was twelve and she knew what she'd been denied.
Astrid walked next to me this time. Not three paces ahead. Not three paces behind. My fleece swallowed her. She had her hands tucked all the way up inside the sleeves. Her boots were squelching on the trail.
We did the first quarter mile without speaking.
Then she said, low, "I haven't done any of that on a person before."
I looked over.
"Dogs. Cats. A goat one time. I did a CE last spring on pediatric trauma because the textbook was on sale, and I sat at the kitchen counter in the brownstone and read the whole thing on a Saturday because I had nothing else to do and Brett was at his mother's." A small huff. "Of course it would be that. Of course, the thing I taught myself out of boredom would be the thing I needed today."
"That wasn't boredom."
"What?"
"You renewed your license every two years. You did your CE. You read a pediatric trauma textbook on a Saturday because you wanted to. That wasn't boredom. That was you keeping yourself alive."
She didn't answer.
She walked beside me in my fleece with her hands in the sleeves and her boots squelching every other step, and I let her have the rest of the trail without trying to fill it.
We came out onto the road where my truck was parked.
