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“Yeah. That would be great.”
“Jillian, don’t go,” Emma said, her big blue eyes blurry with tears. It pained me to see her so sad, but I reminded myself that she wasn’t my child. I wasn’t abandoning her. I had a job to do. A life to live on the other side of the continent.
So I gave her a reassuring smile and said, “Emma, you remember what patient means?”
She nodded sadly, sniffling.
“You’ll see me again, okay? But for now, you have to be patient.”
Later that night I was on a red-eye flight back to Atlanta. It was with a heavy heart that I boarded the plane, feeling somehow like I was walking out on something very important. But what was the problem? Sure, I’d had a wonderful time in California. I’d made a huge sale. I’d had amazing sex. And I got to meet the most adorable little girl on the planet. And now I had to go back to my job. The job I loved, that gave me an amazing lifestyle.
What was I so sad about?
When the plane landed, I called a cab to take me home. I was exhausted, my mind racing in a million directions as I tried to work through my feelings. There was so much going on right now, it was hard to make heads or tails of it. I was so caught up in my thoughts that it took me awhile to remember to check my phone.
When I did, I found that I had several missed calls. From a number I didn’t recognize.
I frowned, confused. I dialed the number for my voicemail box and listened to the one solitary message left there. It was a familiar male voice, but it wasn’t Jeff or Bruin.
“Jillian? Hey. It’s me. I know it’s been forever since we last spoke, but I needed to call you. It’s important. I’m in town this week for work and I need to see you. There’s something I want to talk to you about, and it’s urgent. Can you meet me? This is Danny. Danny Fields.”
“No new messages,” said the phone recording. I hung up and dropped the phone in my lap as the cab pulled up in front of my building.
Holy shit. My ex-boyfriend was in town. And it was urgent.
23
Bruin
“Now, you can hear about the size of these things all you want, but it’s an entirely different experience to actually be there and see one in the flesh.” I said, drew out every word carefully for dramatic effect.
I was at a business dinner with a few old colleagues and some potential new clients. We were sitting around a dinner table at one of the high-end sushi restaurants in Santa Barbara, and I had the entire table watching me with rapt attention. I had a few stories I used to entertain new business associates, but the one about my Alaskan hunting trip with Rhett was one of my favorites.
I even had the young waitress’s attention.
“At this point, I still hadn’t been face-to-face with a bull moose,” I retold the story. “And Rhett and I had a local guide to help navigate the brush. When we caught sight of this monster, it was big enough that I thought the guide’s eyes were going to pop out of his head.”
There was a light laughter around the table as I talked.
“This was October, and I don’t know about Rhett, but for a California boy like me, well, my fingertips were numb already,” I said with a grin. “But seeing it made our blood run hot. There’s no feeling so primal as being confronted with an animal like that, the kind that really makes it hit home that Alaska is an entirely different world.”
A few of the other men at the table who’d hunted nodded in agreement.
“So, I had my muzzle-loader ready, I could practically feel my whole body go still.” There was perfect silence in the room. “And that’s when the calf we hadn’t noticed behind us snorted.”
Eyes went wide around the room. I grinned.
“The giant was maybe ten feet in front of us, and as soon as it heard the calf, it turned, saw us, and it bent its head and charged. I’d never seen something barreling toward me that fast. Rhett and I dove out of the way, and as soon as the crashing sound of almost two tons of animal barreled past us, we were back up and aiming.”
I winked at Rhett, who happened to be sitting across from me, his arms crossed and a grin on his face. We always told the story a little differently. It was an ongoing competition between us.
“And there’s still some debate about who got the shot off first, but we both fired, and the sound of that thing crashing into the ground is still fresh in my memory.”
There was a scattered, impressed murmur throughout the room as the men nodded approvingly, and the waitress took the distraction to hide her blushing face, making her way out of the room to get more drinks for us.
“Where in Alaska was this?” asked Mr. Tanaka, one of the potential new clients at the table.
“Just off the Stikine River in the southeast,” I explained, picking up a piece of nigiri. “I’ll send you the name of my guide, if you’re interested.”
