“Yes.” He straightens slightly, but his hand is still in his pocket, making his body contort at an odd angle. “I wanted to see if you’d want to go on a walk?”
“A walk?”
“It’s still bright outside, and after being in the car for most of the day, I felt kind of cooped up in the room, and I thought maybe you might feel the same way, so I came to ask you if you wanted to join me on a walk.”
“Um, sure,” I say, my voice lifting slightly at the end, making my answer more of a question. Because what is happening? Jacob’s actually volunteering to spend time with me?
“Great,” he says, and we walk downstairs together, leaving the small inn. “I thought we’d just walk down the high street?” He gestures to the main road, and I nod, the two of us falling in step.
We’re both quiet as we walk, and I don’t rush to fill the silence. Jacob’s been a mystery since I met him, and every new fact I learn just makes the picture of him fuzzier. He doesn’t fit in the neat box I tried to place him in. He definitely is a “Brains,” but there’s more to him. He doesn’t seem to want to share any of that with me, but still, there are times when I get glimpses of how he was before he learned my name.
He was honest and open, transparent in a way few people are. And even when he stopped behaving like that around me, he remained that same person with Maggie. With my father. He clearly cares about them, and it’s hard to feel bitter toward him when I see that.
“Earlier you asked about your dad,” Jacob says, and I look at him sideways.
The sun sets much later this far north, so his face is clear in the light. His jaw sharp, his chin lifted. He’s not looking my way, or at anything around us.
Not that there is much around us. It’s quiet here, and there aren’t many cars passing through. Only a few shops line this street. We’ve already passed most of them, having traveled through the center of this town pretty quickly. We’ll have to turn around soon.
“I did,” I say.
He nods, the movement crisp. “I wanted to…I was thinking a lot about your question before, about your dad’s surgery. I know you weren’t here for any of it—”
I go still. “If you’re seriously about to bring this up again—”
“No,” he says. “No. I mean, I am, but only because you asked about it. Earlier. And I wanted to tell you that if you have questions about it, I’m happy to share anything you want. If it was my—” He stops abruptly, clearing his throat. “If it was my dad, and I couldn’t be there while he was going through something like that, I’d want to know everything about what had happened, so if you want to talk about it at all, we can.”
Oh.I blink. “Thanks,” I say, and I can feel a shift beside me as the tension in his posture, in the space between us, relaxes a bit.
I turn his offer over in my mind as we walk. There’s so much I want to know, so much my father hasn’t told me, and I’m curious. These are the missing pieces of information I’ve been craving, but now that I’m presented with the opportunity to know them, I don’t know where to begin.
So I decide to start by saying just that, by sharing something true with him.
“I do want to talk about it. I want to know everything. I just don’t even know what to ask first,” I say.
“Maybe I could tell you how he was at the beginning? At least, when I met him?” Jacob says.
A breeze travels over my wet hair, and goosebumps rise on my skin. “Yes.” I swallow, my throat feeling thick for some reason. “That would be great.”
In the silence before he speaks, a bird calls, a short trill that fills the air, then disappears.
“Maggie and I had been going to the hospital regularly for months,” he says. “I can’t remember exactly how long it had been, but James had been doing chemo for a while. Enough that he’d fully lost his hair.” He pauses. “James was the kind of person who never met a stranger, no matter where he went. He traveled all the time, like you, and he seemed to know someone in every city. He’d tell all these stories and casually mention a friend in Berlin or in Seville or Brisbane. So we shouldn’t have been surprised that he became friends with so many of the other patients getting treatment too. And one of them was your father.
“He was in good shape then, your dad. They’d caught it early and they thought everything would be fine, but he had some other issues besides the cancer. Things related to his heart—nothing toohorrible, honestly, they said it was all pretty normal for his age, but they had to monitor that too and put him on statins and blood pressure medicine. And chemo really takes a lot out of people, so he was having a hard time with all of it. Plus, he was handling everything by himself. He always came to his appointments alone.”
I miss a twig in the middle of the path and almost trip over it, but catch myself in time.
“James and Maggie, they both have—had—this special talent for spotting people who were by themselves, for drawing them out. I’ve never really understood it, but—”
“You do it too,” I say without thinking about it.You did it withme.
“Oh,” he says. His head turns, and I can feel his gaze on the side of my face. “That’s—Thank you.”
I don’t return his look. I focus on the road, trying not to trip again, and force any words climbing up my throat back down. Because I don’t know why I said that, why I seem to have no filter around this man.
“You’re also that way,” he says, and surprise jolts through me.
“Is that a compliment?”
