“You’re welcome to keep walking,” she says, her tone somehow both breezy and disparaging. “I’m sure I can catch up with you hobbling along. But I’m taking a break.”
“Praise the Lord,” I murmur.
She huffs out a laugh, and it washes over me like the first raindrops after a year of drought. I had that laugh—this woman—for two nights, but she’s already embedded into the very fabric of my being.
I follow her to an outcropping of boulders a few yards off the trail, flat enough to sit on and positioned to give us a view of an alpine lake in the valley below. It’s pretty if you’re intobreathtaking nature vistas, but not inspiring enough to pull my attention from Sloane for any length of time.
Sloane takes a granola bar and a water bottle from her pack. I do the same, my fingers clumsy on the zipper because my hands are starting to tremble from the pain I’m bracing for with every step. I have a regular gym routine, but between the altitude and the new shoes, I feel like a complete wuss, especially compared to Sloane. Then she rifles around in a side pocket and produces a small white bottle, taking off the lid before holding it out to me.
“Ibuprofen might take the edge off.”
“You aren’t relishing my suffering?” My thumb brushes hers on the bottle for half a second before she pulls back.
The eye roll she gives me could best be described as aggressive, and I kind of love it.
“That would mean I care one way or the other. I don’t. You’re like any random person I might befriend on the trail.”
I down the tablets with a long pull of water. “So you admit we’re friends?”
“Did you miss the part where I called you a random stranger?”
“Who you want to be friends with,” I insist, releasing a long exhale when she laughs again. The sound does more for me than any painkiller could. I could get addicted to that laugh and the way her face transforms when she lets her guard down for even a second.
I can almost see her trying to shore up her walls as we chew our bars in companionable silence. It feels normal. Just two people having a snack break on a backcountry trail. Only nothing about my inability to stop obsessing over a woman who ghosted me after two nights together is normal. I’d rather not focus on what that reveals about me.
“Tell me about this trip.” I don’t want to waste the potentially limited time I have before she decides she’s done with me again. “What kind of quest are you on?”
“My friends didn’t give you the hot goss?” Her words are averbal eye roll as she takes a sip of water, her gaze fixed on the lake below us instead of on me.
“They told me enough to find you. Not enough to understand why you’re hiking alone through bear country.”
She picks at the wrapper of her granola bar.
“I’m guessing it has something to do with the cancer?”
Her fingers stop their fidgeting, and her shoulders draw up, defensive armor sliding into place. “So they actually told you more than how to find me.”
“I talked to Mariel and Joel Johnson after the caregiver camp concert.” I keep my voice relaxed, like I’m not still wondering how the good luck I’d boasted about as she was leaving my hotel room after our second night together turned to complete shit the moment the door closed behind her. “They were happy to share all about your brother and how your situation motivated him to get involved. But I want to hear your story from you, Sloane.”
In the silence that follows, the wind moves through the pine branches above us, and I hear the distant call of a hawk or an eagle. Or maybe that’s my imagination trying to fill the space between us. I expect her to stand and announce we’re done with the break—to shut me down the same way she did in her bookstore office.
Instead, she draws in a breath and begins to speak. “I was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia last summer, about a month before I met you in Nashville. I was there for a second opinion, treatment planning, meetings with the specialists my brother moved heaven and earth to arrange.” It sounds as if she’s reciting someone else’s medical history rather than her own. “I did the first two rounds of chemo in Colorado, then went to Vanderbilt around Thanksgiving for a stem-cell transplant.”
The timeline I’ve been piecing together in my head slides into place. The scant details she gave me, not to mention the fake name, and the fact that she left before sunrise after two of the best nights of my life, and never came back. I was a distraction from the havoca cancer diagnosis was about to wreak on her life. And I get that. Except it was more than a fling, at least for me.
“You could have told me,” I say quietly.
“Sure, sure. Makes perfect sense to confide in a stranger I met in a bar about my malignant white blood cells.” She meets my eyes for the first time since she started talking. She’s daring me to make this—us—into something bigger than she’s committed to keeping it. “I wanted to be Sutton for a couple of nights, not Sloane the cancer patient. Telling you would have turned me into someone who needed sympathy, and I’d already had enough of that to last a lifetime.”
She bites down on her lower lip like she doesn’t want to say anything more, but continues anyway. “I saw your photo on the volunteer board of the oncology unit and heard about why you give your time there.”
“My mom.” Suddenly, my heart is aching worse than my feet.
I’ve spent a lot of time in cancer units over the years. At Vanderbilt mostly, but also if I got a break while on tour. It’s easy for my manager to set up volunteer shifts in various cities or at cancer fundraisers, and relatively low on the commitment scale. Singing a few songs and strumming my guitar is nothing like watching someone you care about be ravaged by the disease. Nothing at all. But it makes me feel like I’m doing something worthwhile. Even if it’s a temporary distraction for those going through things far tougher than I am these days.
“It hit a little too close to home, you know?”
“Yeah.” I understand with every fiber of my being, even if I don’t like it. I can imagine how she felt learning her pre-treatment hall pass hookup had been volunteering in the same department where she was about to become a patient. Knowing I’d lost my mother the same way Sloane was terrified of losing herself.
