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“What cabin?”
“Zoë, seriously, please don’t worry.”
Later, talking to Will, I voiced my concerns about leaving.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Everything will be fine. Brianna said she could look after Zoë and its only for five nights.”
Brianna was one of Zoë’s old nannies, a girl who’d quit the job to go to graduate school. She’d qualified as a lawyer and was looking for a job with a good firm but was available for babysitting. When Will heard she had signed up again with the agency, he’d immediately asked if she was available.
“I still don’t know if it’s a good idea.”
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave Will.
“You said you needed this time with your brother,” Will reminded me. “Didn’t you say that?”
I had said that.
Earlier in the week when we’d spoken about the trip, Kevin had told me he wanted to talk to me about something, but he’d do it in Alaska. No matter how much I pushed him, he wouldn’t tell me.
“What if you decide you like Brianna better than me and when I come back, she’s got my bed and the fluffy towels?” I pouted.
“I’ll never give her your towels,” Will promised solemnly and kissed my cheek.
The next morning, I took a cab to the airport, where I met my brother, and we boarded a long flight to Alaska. Kevin was looking tired, but he gave me a big smile and a warm hug.
“So good to see you,” he said.
We had turbulence on the flight, so bad that we had to keep the seatbelts on all night. I ended up drinking a whole lot of vodka to calm my nerves and hopefully put me to sleep, but the bumpy plane kept waking me up.
Kevin slept through all of it, of course.
By the time we landed, I was feeling worse for wear and was in a foul mood. We got our hired car and set off for the cabin.
I had told Kevin about the fortune teller once, years ago, when I was still at school. He’d listened to the whole story and said to me, “You know that’s bullshit, right?”
“But what about the stuff that came true?” I said to him, and he’d laughed. “Coincidence! Jeez, girl, ever heard of that?”
It made me sick to my stomach to hear him say that and it sowed seeds of doubt in my heart.
“You wanna believe it, that’s the problem,” he’d laughed at me.
That had hurt more than anything. Him thinking that I was being silly and dumb. Kevin had always had my back before. But after this, I was more careful about what I’d said to him. To his credit though, he’d never shared my story with anyone. After his marriage to Jessica hit the rocks, he once told me that he wished he had something to believe in, even if it was something as “cooky” as a fortune teller’s words.
Then, on our first night at the damp and smelly cabin, both of us wrapped in thick blankets to keep out the unexpected cold seeping through the walls, he took out a bottle of whiskey and said, “So, you still looking for your mountain man?”
“I don’t know,” I said. After our trip, my terrible night on the plane and the drive here, I was in no mood to beat around the bush. “I really like being with Will. Sometimes I think he could be the one.”
“You gonna marry him, raise his kid?” Kevin asked.
“I don’t know. But when we’re together, it’s easy and we have a good time.”
“Yeah, I know about that,” Kevin said, darkly. He was getting ready for another Jessica bashing, I thought. I took a big gulp of whiskey and felt it burn all the way down.
Instead, he said.
“I’ve decided to take a job in private security. It’s with an outfit in Africa somewhere. Security at a mine.”
“What?”
