Chapter 6
Almost there,” Liz said, putting the rental vehicle into a lower gear as they bumped down a single-track lane.
The mountain range to the west was cloaked in cloud, so all Maggie could see was forest-lined foothills rising into billowing white mist. Late summer colors had darkened with the coming season shift.
They rounded a bend, and a wide lake was revealed, its dark, still surface like the back of a shining beetle.
At its foot crouched a timber mountain lodge.
Liz pulled up on a gravel lot beside a pickup truck loaded with logs. She cut the ignition, unclipped her seat belt, then threw open the door.
A sharp breeze, scored with the scent of rock, blasted into the car. Maggie shivered.
Liz stood with her hands planted on her hips, staring at the mountains. She’d traveled in her hiking gear—boots, technical trousers, and a navy fleece—and looked ready to stride out. “This really is wilderness,” she said, and Maggie wondered if there was a hint of fear in her voice.
Helena turned in her seat. “You coming, Mags?”
She swallowed. Her legs were stiff as she climbed out. The wind lifted the hem of her dress, and she pulled her cardigan around her shoulders. Tension fizzed down the left side of her spine, her emotions showing themselves in her body.
Maggie had always considered her home on the outskirts of Bath as living in the sticks.
She saw herself as someone who loved nature and the wild outdoors.
But as she stood here, drinking in a landscape carved from rock and ice, strewn with lakes and forest, thrumming beneath a wind-blasted sky, she understood her previous scale of wild had been annihilated.
On the long drive here, they’d been drawn through dense forests of unbroken green.
Mountains had risen from the earth, their peaks swallowed by cloud.
They’d passed rivers so deep and muscular they seemed to tear through the landscape.
Apart from the lodge, she couldn’t see a single other building.
This wild was dizzying. It was too much.
Too big. She felt suddenly panicky, like she’d made a terrible mistake.
She was beginning to sweat. The scenery looked rugged, beautiful even, something to be marveled at through a window, but hiking through it?
Climbing mountain paths? Sleeping out there?
Liz had heaved their backpacks from the car and was wrestling hers onto her shoulders. “I’ll check us in.”
Maggie didn’t move.
Helena said to Liz, “We’ll follow.”
Liz locked the car, then strode toward the lodge entrance, her top half obscured by her backpack.
Helena bumped her shoulder against Maggie’s, asking, “Y’okay?”
She shook her head. “There’s so much . .
. space. It’s too big. Too much of everything .
. . I feel so far from home . . . from Phoebe.
” She pulled her phone from her dress pocket, blinking at the screen.
“I’ve only got one bar of signal. What if I can’t call Phoebe?
I need to be able to speak to her. What if there’s a problem? If she needs me?”
Maggie knew she shouldn’t be complaining to Helena—she was the one who’d paid for her flights, as Maggie couldn’t afford to come—yet all her anxieties were suddenly spooling out, unstoppable.
“Remember that exercise regime Liz sent through? The one I said I did? I lied. I printed it off. Stuck it to the fridge. Planned to follow it . . . but . . .” She shook her head.
“I know I sound like one of those mothers who make excuses because they have children—but honestly, there was no time to go on training hikes. Phoebe is too heavy to carry now, and the only time I have to myself is the two mornings she’s in preschool, but that’s when I do my Etsy orders. ”
She glanced toward the lodge as Liz disappeared inside.
“Liz told me to do Joe Wicks’s workouts in the evenings instead.
” She grimaced. “I did three. Well. Two. And the final one, I only managed three burpees, before collapsing on the sofa and watching Joe doing squats and lunges while I ate cookies. And now I’m out here, completely unfit, and I’m going to let you all down and .
. . it would be better if I just left. That’s what I should do.
Yes. I should go. I know you paid for my trip—and God, you’re so generous and good to me, and I feel terrible that now I’m saying I want to go home—but I do.
I want to go home.” She was nodding feverishly.
“I’m a shit friend, but I need to leave.
I’ll go back—use the time to get some jobs done.
Paint the window frames. Clear out the shed.
Reseed the bare patches in the lawn . . .
” She trailed off, finally running out of words.
Helena was looking at her steadily. She arched a single dark brow as she said, “You’d like to go home and reseed your lawn?”
Maggie lifted her shoulders.
Helena pressed her red lips together. “You know that you always do this, right?”
“What?”
“Get scared. Want to leave. Remember the holiday to Barcelona when you wanted to turn back at the airport?”
Maggie thought for a moment, recalling how she hadn’t liked the high-rise buildings, or the smell of tar from the roadworks, and that everything felt unfamiliar and out of balance. “I always do this?”
“The long weekend in France?”
She thought back. “I got heat rash and worried it was an infectious disease and decided I should go home to be in the care of the NHS.”
“That’s right. By tomorrow you’ll be fine. You’ll be raring to climb these mountains.”
“Raring?”
“Maybe not raring. But you’ll have made peace with it.”
Maggie sighed, feeling a sense of relief. “It’s true, though, about watching Joe Wicks’s working out while I ate cookies.”
“I watch him while taking a bath.”
Maggie grinned.
“Maybe don’t mention the lack-of-exercise thing to Liz. She keeps doing her thousand-megawatt smile, which means she’s secretly crapping herself, too.”
“Do you think I can do this? The hike?”
Helena eyed her. “Y’know why I paid for your trip?”
“For my charming monologues and emotional intelligence?”
“Because I wanted to hike with someone who’d hate it even more than me.” She toed Maggie’s backpack, then her own. “Come on. Let’s see if we can lift these bastards.”