Page 79 of Shadowing You

“A cheeseburger, two patties, but the thin kind, not the fat ones, with pickles and lettuce and mayonnaise. And crispy french fries with lots of salt, and ranch dressing on the side to dip.”

“No ketchup.”

She shuddered. “Why ruin my lovely meal?”

He smiled. “That’ll be our first meal when we get home.”

When we get home.

If they got home. She set her chopsticks down. “What are we going to do?”

He sat back. “I need to call Michael. I’m sure he’s been working on a plan. Problem is, there’s no signal up here.”

“We will have to leave, then.” The thought of trudging through the forest again made her eyes sting. She wasn’t ready.

“Not we. Just me.” He crossed to a topographical map pinned near the table, tapping a point marked with a red circle. “I think this is us, here. There’s a town”—he moved his finger to the east—“right here. Opposite from Fuyin, and closer. I assume they’ll have cell service. If not, I’ll have to find Wi-Fi somewhere.”

“How far is it?”

“Just a few miles as the crow flies.”

“We will follow a crow?”

He smiled. “It’s an expression. It means it’s a few miles in a straight line, but I won’t be able to walk in a straight line.”

“Ah, I see.” She studied the lines and realized the crow would fly right off the ridge. “We’ll go down the mountain?”

“I will. I charged my phone, and I’ve got a good route mapped out. I think it’ll take a couple of hours down, a couple of hours back.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“You’re staying here.”

“Ethan—”

“You can barely stand.” He came back to the table and crouched beside her chair. “Mei Lin, you need to rest. Determination will only get you so far.”

She wanted to argue, but she didn’t have the energy—which proved he was right. It wasn’t that she wanted to walk for hours again today. It was that she didn’t want to stay by herself. “I don’t want you to leave me.”

“For a few hours, that’s all.” He stood. “You need to rest. I don’t see another way.”

“What if someone comes?”

“You’ll have to run.”

“What if they surprise me? There’s only one door, and the windows are blocked. I could be trapped.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to be walking up here. If a ranger comes, he’ll come on a bike or a Polaris or something.”

She had no idea what a Polaris was.

“You’ll hear him coming long before he gets here. Just tidy the place up so it looks like it did when we got here last night. That way, if someone does come, he won’t know we’ve been here. He won’t go looking for you.”

She couldn’t think of a suitable argument. Ethan was right. He needed to contact Michael, and she needed to rest. And the chances that someone would come here today—when the place had obviously been empty for months—seemed slim. Of course, the chances that she’d have seen both Nurse Wen and Ying the day before, and that the man who’d heard Ying call her name must’ve worked for Lu Feng, had also been slim.

She didn’t want to take any more chances. She wanted to stay with her husband and go to America and be done with all of this.

“You promise you’ll come back for me?” She hated how small her voice sounded.