Page 72 of Roadrunner

“Goodnight,” I said.

“Night,” he said. His voice had changed slightly. Lower. He was looking at me with that directness of his and something additional that he wasn’t putting into words.

I got out of the truck.

I went inside.

I leaned against the closed front door in the dark hallway and pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and smiled like an idiot.

I stood there for a long minute like that, grinning at nothing. I understood that whatever this was between us, it wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot how to feel. You just forgot, for a while, that you were still capable of it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Alex

Now

He took me to the mountains.

Not Mount Lemmon. Somewhere further north. A trail he knew that wound up through the high desert and broke out along a ridge with a view that went on until the earth curved away from it.

We parked where the trail started and walked.

He didn’t push the pace. I didn’t ask him to. We went the way we always went on trails, which was his pace at the front and mine behind and neither of us feeling the need to fill the space between us with conversation.

The trail rose steadily. My legs remembered it before my lungs did.

An hour in we broke out onto the ridge.

I stopped.

The view was exactly what he’d promised. The valley below us spread out in every direction. The mountains beyond it. The blue they turned at this time of morning, soft and impossible and specific to this place and nowhere else.

I stood and looked at it, the ache of a wasted decade and the specific relief of standing in this exact place again arriving in the same breath, and I made myself not sort them into which one I was allowed to feel first.

He stood beside me.

“Well?” he asked.

“Don’t say I told you so,” I said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were thinking it.”

“Probably.”

I looked out at the mountains. At the distance. At the shade of blue that I had been carrying around in the back of my head for years like a photograph that never faded.

“I need to go back to California,” I said.

He looked at the view. “I know.”

“I need to settle things,” I said. “The house. Arthur’s school. There are practical things that need doing before—” I paused. “Before anything else can happen.”

“How long?” he asked.

“A month,” I said. “Maybe six weeks.”