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I hesitated a second, but realized she was right. I needed to heal. I owed it to myself to stay.
Me: Okay, love you.
* * *
“You did amazing!”I congratulated Ellis, my seventy-two-year-old tent mate, tossing a handful of nuts into my mouth.
“I was sure I was about to slip.” She smiled, her face bright and flushed with exhilaration.
Speaking while chewing, I shook my head. “I knew you had it.”
We were still hiking around smaller summits, ignoring the looks of more experienced backpackers and native mountain climbers who were used to the altitude of Colorado and the cold. It was freezing, and while our tour guide, Jonathan, promised it was still perfectly safe to camp in October, more and more of our group had begun to fizzle out. Ellis and I had decided to share a smaller tent to help with the warmth. Ellis was out here giving herself a second chance at life after she finally left a marriage she never wanted after nearly thirty-five years.
I felt a kinship with her for that. It was obviously different from my situation, but we were both single and finding ourselves now.
It was when I ducked back into the tent that I found a new text from Nora. She’d been texting more and more often, but just little things here and there, nothing earth shattering. I also had been calling my parents twice a week to check in, so I knew nothing too crazy was going on back home. From the sound of it, the grump had gone back to avoiding the town, or at least that’s what I assumed since I hadn’t heard anything about him.
So, I pulled out a protein bar and read through her messages.
Nora: Okay…so, you’ve been in Colorado for two weeks. I miss you.
Nora: It’s not just that I miss you. There’s been some things happening here…I haven’t exactly been honest about it, because I wanted you to have your time…
Nora: You need to come home, I think it’s pretty serious.
What in the actual hell? I was about to pull up her contact to call her when my mother’s name flashed on my screen.
“Hello?”
“Rae, honey…” She sounded so gentle, the exact opposite of the panic in Nora’s messages.
“Hi Mom, everything okay?”
I chewed my bar, moving around a few of the items in my backpack, sorting out my dirty and clean clothes.
“Well…honey, things aren’t so great here. You need to come back.” My stomach clenched tight with nerves. First Nora, now my mom. What on earth was going on?
“Mom, what’s wrong? Nora mentioned something and—”
“It’s Davis, honey. He’s… you just need to come back.”
Worry wound around my heart like a rope, pulling tighter and tighter with each second that passed as I tried to find the right words to say, but the only thing coming to mind was panic.
“Is—” I couldn’t even ask, because what if he wasn’t safe? I closed my eyes, bringing a shaky hand to my head to push back my hair. “Is he okay?”
My mother paused, and the silence seemed to tear a new fissure in my heart. I was too far away. If something had happened to him, I would never forgive myself.
“His brother died, honey. He’s not handling it well—”
Oh my God. No. That couldn’t be right.
He was going to call; he was going to get closure.
“Rae?”
“I’m sorry, did you say his brother?”
“Yes, honey, his brother Timothy. He passed, and—" I tuned the rest out. I couldn’t listen to her tell me that Davis lost the only person who was tied to his redemption. The only person who could have made him whole.
