Page 79 of The Trip of a Lifetime

Cally: And do you still feel like this now? After forging friendships and having ‘life-changing’ and ‘revelatory’ experiences? Is it really all about the race?

Martha: Yes, yes it actually is.

Cally: Okay, and Erin. Back at the start I asked you if there might be a frisson of something between you and Sam and you said, I quote, ‘over my dead body’. How does that stack up now, as you’re nearing the end of the race?

Erin: Maybe not so much over my dead body now. Perhaps over my warm and beating heart?

‘Okay, cut. Wow! Erin, laying it all out there. How wonderful. Thanks so much, ladies, and the next time I interview you, you’ll be on the finish line,’ Cally said, beginning to gather her things. ‘Erin, you and Sam are so cute together. We will definitely be pushing that angle in the final cut if that’s okay with you.’

‘Fine with me,’ Erin said.

‘Does this mean I’ve lost my puzzle partner?’ Noah said.

‘No way. I’ll meet you in the dining room in ten minutes,’ she said as she and Cally left the room together.

‘Martha?’ Noah said before I could leave too. ‘I have some footage I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Fire away.’

‘It was when you took the camera on your nature walk on Haida Gwaii,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes, I tried to get some footage of the bald eagles. Was it awful?’

‘No, it was great, but I think you must have left it running when you and Erin were talking. I only caught the beginning; I didn’t carry on listening after I realised it was personal. I just wanted to let you know and to reassure you it wouldn’t be making its way onto the screen.’

‘Thank you, Noah.’

‘Do you want me to send it to you?’

I thought about that for a moment, tried to remember what I was feeling then. I was willing Erin to say something profound about her mother. But we’d turned a corner on that, hadn’t we? I’d finally got Erin talking.

‘No,’ I said carefully. ‘Could you delete it please? We don’t need that now.’

34

ERIN

The envelope was a prop really, now. They already knew they were going to St John’s but Erin dutifully opened it and there was a moment when she wondered if they were going to surprise them with a different checkpoint. Her heart stopped for just a second until she saw the words on the paper.

Your final checkpoint is St John’s

They had watched Harrison and Sam leave from the viewpoint of their bedroom window exactly three hours ago. Erin felt as if she were never going to see Sam again, which clearly wasn’t true. She was twenty-five but the feelings rolling around her body and mind were those of a teenager. She wanted to laugh at how silly she was being but she just couldn’t stop it.

They had walked the gardens of the guest house after dinner the previous evening and had made small plans to meet up in Marlow. He was going to teach her to row, which terrified her. And they’d talked about him coming to her place where Erin wanted to cook him something special. They had held hands and kissed and Erin was glad in one way they’d not had the opportunity to sleep together. She liked the idea of an old-fashioned courtship. The building up of a friendship before next steps.

She’d had a couple of one-night stands before Hamish. Both had left her feeling nothing at all. Hamish and she had fallen into going out after a mutual friend introduced them and Hamish had considered Erin his girlfriend as some sort of default setting. On what should have been their second date – which was actually drinks with his friends at the rugby club – he had introduced her as his girlfriend, as if they’d been going out for months rather than the reality, which was that those drinks were only the second time she’d ever seen him.

It wasn’t that she wanted to take things particularly slowly with Sam, more that she hoped it would develop naturally without either of them forcing the other into something they weren’t comfortable with. The thought of seeing Sam again made her whole body fizz with excitement. She wondered if Martha felt the same way about Harrison. She wasn’t about to ask.

‘Right,’ Martha said. ‘We know what we need to do; get back to Charlottetown and get to the ferry port.’

Erin checked the notes she’d made in her journal.

‘There are four ferries to Caribou today,’ Erin said. ‘I imagine we might make the third at three. It’s not likely we’ll get there early enough for the second at ten and the one at seven left an hour ago. I doubt even Harrison and Sam got that one.’

‘Right,’ Martha said decidedly. ‘I think we should start walking and if a car passes us, we do it the old-fashioned way – we stick out a thumb.’

‘What? Are you kidding? We might get murdered,’ Erin said.