“Keep her safe,” he said.
“I will,” I promised him. “I got her. Don’t worry.”
He nodded and let go.
Outside, the night was cold and clear, and the stars shone with relentless intensity, as if they had something to prove. We helped Aggie to her car, waving as she drove off toward home.We walked over to the truck and then stood there. We stayed on the passenger side in the cold, not quite ready to move yet.
I reached for her hand.
She gave it to me without looking, found my hand with hers in the dark, fingers threading through, a small and certain thing.
“That was a lot,” she said.
“It was. More than I think either of us was expecting when we walked in there tonight.”
She let out a slow breath. “Aggie—” She stopped. Started again. “She just told it like it was nothing. Like it was just the facts of a thing that happened.”
“That’s how she carries it,” I said. “Some people, that’s the only way they can.”
Becca turned her face up toward the sky. I watched her profile in the dark, admiring the line of her jaw, the small crease between her brows that appeared when she was worried.
“I keep thinking about the woman who’s been sober for three years,” she said quietly. “I can’t stop thinking about her. I don’t know her name, don’t know her face, and she’s probably asleep twenty feet from my trailer right now, and she has no idea that someone in Portland is sitting in a nice office deciding whether her home is worth more as a resort.”
“No,” I said. “She doesn’t.”
“That’s the part that keeps snagging on me. She did everything right. She got sober, she stayed sober, she built something small and quiet and hers. And none of that counts for anything to these people. They don’t even know she exists.” Her voice had gone tight at the edges. “They’ve never once had to know she exists.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say to that, and she didn’t need me to fill the space.
“I know what I want to do,” she said finally.
“I know you do,” I said. “I’ve been watching you decide for the last hour.”
She looked at me then. In the dark, in the cold. Her eyes were steady and clear and completely unafraid, and I thought about the girl who had put her voice behind a filter and whispered into a microphone alone at night because she needed somewhere to put the truth, and the woman standing in front of me now who was going to take the filter off and say it where everyone could hear it.
I was so proud of her, I didn’t have words for it.
“I’m scared,” she said. “I want to be honest about that. I’m not standing here feeling brave. I’m standing here feeling terrified, but I’m going to do it anyway, and I need you to know those are different things.”
“They are,” I said. “And for what it’s worth, the second one matters a hell of a lot more than the first.”
Something in her face softened, just slightly. “You’re not going to tell me it’ll be fine?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know if it’ll be fine. But I know you, and I know that whatever happens, I don’t think you’ll regret it.”
She held my gaze for a moment longer, something passing across her face that I couldn’t quite name but felt the weight of. Then she squeezed my hand and turned toward the truck.
We drove back to Riverside Pines in quiet. Not the heavy kind of quiet that presses down, but the soft, shared kind that comes after a long day when words aren’t necessary because everything important has already been said. Becca’s hand rested on my thigh the whole way, thumb moving in slow, absent circles. I kept my left hand on the wheel and my right over hers, fingers laced loosely, every few minutes giving a small squeeze. She squeezed back.
The campground lights were low when we pulled in—most trailers dark, a few porch lamps glowing like fireflies. Aggie’sAirstream had one curtained window lit; Gerald’s silhouette moved across it like a small, imperious shadow. I parked in my usual spot beside Becca’s trailer, killed the engine, and we sat for a moment listening to the ticks of cooling metal and the river’s steady murmur beyond the trees.
We got out, crossed the short stretch of gravel. She unlocked her door, flicked on the small lamp just inside, and the warm yellow light spilled across the familiar space. She kicked off her boots by the door; I did the same. We moved around each other with the easy familiarity of people who’d spent years orbiting the same small patch of ground, only now the orbit had tightened to nothing at all.
She went straight to the kitchenette, filled the kettle, and set it on the burner. I leaned against the counter and watched her—hair still a little messy from the day, sleeves pushed up, the way she moved like she was settling into her own skin for the first time in a long time.
“You want tea?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Whatever you’re having.”
