Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 95436 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95436 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Leo coughed out a horrified sound, running a shaking hand through his hair. The soft black strands immediately fell back over his forehead. “Then this whole time?” he croaked. “This whole time you thought—?”
“That you just never called me back.”
His calm exterior broke, and he turned away from her, letting out a breath that seemed to have been trapped somewhere in his chest for the past ten years. She wanted to bury herself in the desert. She’d been so wounded, so young, so reactive, so alone.
“No wonder you were so mad in the boot shed.” Leo bent, bracing his head in his hands and letting out a wry laugh. “Wow, okay, this explains a lot.”
Feeling nauseated, she released a slow breath. “I wish I had known. I’m so sorry about your mom.”
“No.” He turned to look at her. “I can’t imagine a worse combination of circumstances. I hate that you thought I just bailed.”
She nodded, swallowing so she could speak. Her throat was suddenly so dry. “I know.”
“Mom hung on for about an hour after I got there,” he said, eyes on the fire. “I’ll always be grateful that I got to say goodbye. She’d taken a turn for the worse when I was on the plane. After that I just—I don’t know. I probably did forget about everything else for a few days—even you. I’m sorry, I see it in hindsight. I—I think something inside me broke, but I couldn’t fall apart because—” He shook his head. “Cora’d been with Mom when she was hit by the car, and she was hysterical.”
Silence blanketed the campfire; even the embers seemed to go still. The alternate versions of their past branched out into fresh paths in her mind, and for a beat Lily let herself flounder: If I’d just kept my phone, or if Duke had driven into town to find me, or if the worst of it hadn’t happened and Duke hadn’t—
No. Lily shut down those thoughts. If they had spoken? It wouldn’t have mattered. Ten years older, Lily Wilder now understood that she and Leo never would have worked. It was a brutal truth, but it was what it was. They were from different realities.
She looked over at him. “I assume your dad never came back?” All she could remember him telling her was that his father left when Cora was little, that he hadn’t been in the picture since.
Leo shook his head. “One of my mom’s cousins in Japan tracked him down, and he basically said, ‘Isn’t Leo old enough to handle it?’ ”
“ ‘It’ meaning his daughter?” she asked, gaping. “What a piece of shit.”
Leo nodded, shifting beside her. “You got that right.”
Stillness—understanding—settled in the warm air. At only twenty-two, Leo had been tasked with raising his little sister on his own. “You stayed in New York?”
“Brooklyn. Our landlord was great. He didn’t raise our rent—I think he actually lowered it and then kept it there for years. I’m sure it would have been cheaper to move, but Mom was gone. I couldn’t leave the only place we’d lived with her. I couldn’t do that to Cora. Mom had some savings, and the life insurance money helped. I finished school and got a job as soon as I could.”
She blew out a slow breath. “And you raised her.”
A proud smile broke through. “Yeah.”
“That must have been so hard. On both of you.”
“She’s the best thing I’ve done with my life. She graduated from Columbia last week, did I tell you? She starts medical school in Boston in the fall.”
Lily whistled, impressed. “Wow. Good for her.” She looked over at him. “There’s a lot in the middle that you left out about yourself, did you notice that?”
“Yeah.” Leo glanced at her and shrugged, as if his own life were so inconsequential it was just an afterthought. “It feels a little like I’m only now coming out of a fog, to be honest.”
“That’s a long fog.”
“No kidding.” He laughed softly. “I had this realization the other night that for the past ten years I only had one goal—to take care of Cora—and I haven’t done anything to plan for what comes next. I’m facing that now: What is my life going to be?”
She could be no help. Lily didn’t even know what her own life was meant to be.
Leo bent, picking up a stick and tapping it against one of the rocks in a ring around the fire. She could feel him moving on, remembered the gesture, how he would change the subject with movement before words. His voice carried a new lightness when he spoke. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
His unsure smile was a slow-growing assault on her libido. “What exactly are we going to find at the end of this trip?”
This was not at all what she expected him to say. “You’re going to find yourselves,” she said with exaggerated sincerity. “Your love for the outdoors and sense of adventure.”