I’m the kind of woman who tells a careful version of my life to half a million followers and a full one to almost nobody. I’m extremely good at the careful version. I’ve built a brand on the careful version.
But last night, by a fire, after four hours of knowing him, I’d told Spencer Kirk a full version. Not the worst version, not the most embarrassing version—just the actual one. I’m holding a following. Barely. And I’d said it without flinching, and I’d watched him not flinch back, and I’d slept.
I’d slept like I hadn’t slept in three months.
That was what was really bothering me.
I heard his truck door close up on the road, through the trees. Then his boots on the trail. He came through the laurel screen into my campsite with a small soft cooler over his shoulder.
He’d shaved that morning—the line of his jaw was clean, not the day-two shadow from last night. Clean work pants. A faded navy T-shirt.
He looked at my day bag on the ground and then at me on the log. “You been waiting long?”
“No.”
That was a lie. He probably knew it was a lie.
“You eat lunch yet?”
“No.”
“Good.”
He hefted the soft cooler. “Made you a sandwich.”
“You made me a sandwich.”
“I make myself one every morning. Wasn’t any harder to make two.”
I didn’t know what to do with that.
He opened the passenger door for me. I climbed up. He shut it behind me and walked around to his side. He set the cooler between us on the bench seat and started the truck.
“How far?”
“Ten minutes up. Then we hike.”
“To where?”
“You’ll see.”
He drove me up Creekside Road past my campsite turnoff and took a left onto a forest service road I hadn’t noticed on the way in. Gravel. Narrow. Trees pressing in. He drove it the way a man drives a road he’s driven a thousand times—easy on the wheel, slowing for the washouts before I saw them coming.
He pulled over at an unmarked turnout. There was no sign. There was no kiosk. There was no trail register. There was a faint footpath through the rhododendron, and he slung the cooler over his shoulder by its strap and led me into it.
The path climbed.
It was harder than the tourist trails I’d done on the way in. Roots and rock, a couple of pull-up scrambles, no switchbacks where switchbacks would have been kind. My legs started to burn in the first half hour, in the good way, the way they burned on a real hike. He walked ahead of me at a steady pace and glanced back at intervals to check on me without slowing.
I kept up.
He didn’t say anything for the first half hour. He let me hike.
Then, over his shoulder, without looking back at me, “Why’d you pick Laurel Creek?”
“What?”
“For the campsite. You said you scouted it on your way in. I want to know what you saw.”
