3. Lara
three
Lara
I tell myself I'm going for a walk.
That's true. The morning is clear and cool and the kind of June day that feels like a gift, the light already doing that gold-through-the-firs thing that makes me want to be outside in it.
I'm up and out before the diner opens for breakfast, trail map in my back pocket even though I don't really need it anymore.
I know this section of trail now. I've been on it every morning for five days.
It has nothing to do with the fact that I know he'll be on it too.
That's also true, mostly.
He's coming down when I'm going up, which is new. I round a bend in the lower section and there he is, pack on, camera bag over one shoulder, moving down the slope with that unhurried ease that I have absolutely stopped noticing.
He sees me and slows.
"Morning," I say.
"Morning." He falls into step beside me, which means he's turning around and going back up, which he does without comment or explanation like it's just a thing that's happening.
I don't say anything about it. Neither does he.
We walk for a while in the good quiet. The trail climbs through spruce and then opens onto a section of meadow where the wildflowers are losing their minds — paintbrush, yarrow, something purple I don't know the name of. I make a mental note to ask him. He'll know.
"Owls come back to the nest?" I ask.
He glances at me sideways. "How do you know about the nest?"
"You mentioned it at lunch. The blind you set, the female that wasn't showing."
He's quiet for a moment. "She came back this morning. Both of them. I got what I was waiting for."
The way he says it — low, satisfied, like something long-held has finally resolved — does something to my chest that I'm not going to examine too carefully.
It's the same quality I heard when he told me about the grizzly.
The patience of a man who knows how to want something without letting the wanting make him frantic.
I've spent six years being frantic. I'd forgotten there was another way.
"Can I see it?" I ask. "The shot."
He looks at me. Considering. "I don't usually show work in progress."
"Fair enough."
A pause. "I'll show you this one."
He pulls the camera from the bag and turns the screen toward me, and I stop walking to look at it properly.
Two great grey owls on a dead snag, both facing the same direction into the morning light.
The image is so still it feels like held breath.
The detail in the feathers is extraordinary — the kind of thing that takes either extraordinary equipment or extraordinary patience. Probably both.
He's standing close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him in the cool morning air. I'm very aware of that and I look at the camera screen and not at him.
"Shaw," I gasp.
"Yeah."
"This is remarkable."
He takes the camera back. Looks at the screen himself for a moment before he puts it away, and I catch something in his face — not pride exactly, more like quiet recognition. He just receives it. Doesn't shrug it off or perform modesty.
I like that more than I should.
We keep walking.
Somewhere around the two-hour mark I realize I've told him things I haven't said out loud since I got here.
Not deep things. Just the texture of the last six years.
The way a consulting career hollows you out so slowly you don't notice until you're standing in a glass-walled boardroom watching yourself give a presentation and wondering who that person is.
The way the marriage ending wasn't a catastrophe but an exhalation.
Two people releasing each other, both okay, and that somehow being almost harder to explain than if it had been a disaster.
He listens. Doesn't offer analysis or silver linings. Just follows.
At one point I say: "I think I stayed in both of them, the job and the marriage, because I was good at them and I confused being good at something with wanting it."
He's quiet for a few steps. Then: "That's a long way to go before you notice."
"Six years," I say.
"Yeah."
No judgment. No you should have known sooner. Just acknowledgment that it happened and it was a long time and here I am now.
The trail leads us to a viewpoint I haven't been to before: a rocky outcrop above a bend in the valley where the whole of Silver Ridge is visible below, small and tidy in its ring of mountains.
We sit on the rocks and I don't say it's beautiful because it obviously is and some things don't need confirming.
He doesn't say it either.
We eat the granola bars I'd shoved in my pocket and drink from his thermos — he offers it without fuss and I take it without fuss. We're not doing anything. We're just two people eating granola bars on a rock above a valley.
He asks about where I grew up. I tell him about Prince George, my grandmother, the land. He listens.
"She'd like it here," I say, meaning my grandmother. "She approves of places that make you slow down."
He looks at the valley. "It's good country."
"Yeah," I say. "It is."
We start back down mid-afternoon. By the time the trail meets the lower junction I've been walking with this man for four hours and it has felt like one.
Main Street is quiet in the mid-afternoon lull. We come off the trail at the edge of town and slow without discussing it, the way you do when you're not ready for something to end and you're hoping the other person isn't either.
We stop at the corner where the street meets the trailhead. There's no reason to stop here. We stop anyway.
He's looking at me and I'm looking at him and the four hours of trail are sitting between us like a thing with weight.
His camera bag strap cuts across his chest and I am having thoughts about that chest that are not appropriate for a public street corner and I look at his face instead, which is not significantly safer.
"I should get back," I say. I don't move.
"Yeah," he says. He doesn't move either.
The afternoon light is long and warm on the street behind him and he's so close I could close the distance in one step and I am genuinely considering it, which is not something I've considered about anyone in two years.
My whole body is leaning toward him in a way that has nothing to do with conscious decision-making.
He looks at my mouth.
It's brief. A second, maybe less. Then his eyes are back on mine and his expression has gone very still in the way that means he's working something out, and I know what he's working out because I'm working out the same thing.
The moment stretches.
Then a truck rolls past on Main Street and we both come back to ourselves, a small recalibration, half a step between us that wasn't there before.
"Tomorrow's trail might be good," he says. His voice is even but there's something in it that wasn't there at the start of the morning. "If you want."
I want to say: I want a lot of things right now, the trail is not at the top of the list. I don't say that.
"What time?" I say instead.
"Six."
"I'll be there."
He nods and holds my gaze for one beat longer than necessary. Then he turns and walks away up the street, camera bag over his shoulder, unhurried as always.
I stand at the corner and watch him go and do not pretend I'm not watching.