Chapter 13
It happened without warning, the way these things always seemed to.
They were curled up on the couch that afternoon, Alex reading with her feet in Dani’s lap, when both their phones buzzed at once, then again, then in a rapid, relentless cascade that had nothing to do with the sluggish single bar they’d occasionally gotten near the window all week.
“Oh,” Dani said, sitting up so fast Alex’s feet nearly slid off her lap entirely. “Oh, that’s a lot of phone.”
Outside, faint but unmistakable, came the low mechanical growl of a plow working its way up the mountain road, blade scraping against packed snow somewhere beyond the tree line.
“Guess they finally got to us,” Alex said, already reaching for her own phone, screen lighting up with notification after notification stacking on top of each other faster than she could read them.
Cass, mostly. A wall of texts sent over the last four days, apparently composed in increments whenever a bar of signal briefly wandered past Portugal’s own patchy coverage.
Are you two okay?? Did you kill each other?
? Please tell me you didn’t kill each other.
Then, an hour later, Marisol says stop worrying, they’re grown women, but also PLEASE UPDATE ME.
Then, much more recently, something that made Alex’s mouth twitch despite herself.
Okay the silence is either very bad or very interesting and at this point I’m choosing to believe it’s interesting.
Call me when you can. Also I love you. Also tell Dani I said hi. Also CALL ME.
Alex laughed under her breath, already composing a reply, and glanced over at Dani, expecting to find her similarly buried in a backlog of texts from friends or family checking in.
Instead Dani was very still, phone held a little too carefully, eyes fixed on something on the screen that had wiped every trace of her earlier laughter clean off her face.
“Everything okay?” Alex asked, only half paying attention, still scrolling through Cass’s increasingly unhinged message chain.
“Yeah.” Dani’s voice came out light, easy, entirely unbothered. “Just the agency. Confirming my next placement.”
“Oh yeah? Where’s next?”
“Sedona.” Dani said it simply, thumb already moving to close out of the email, like there was nothing more to say about it at all. “Starts a couple days after this one wraps up.”
“That’s soon.”
“That’s the job.” Dani smiled, and it looked almost entirely real, practiced enough that Alex, still half distracted by Cass’s texts, didn’t catch the small, careful thing happening underneath it. “Always is.”
Alex nodded, already turning back to her own phone, already composing her reply to Cass, and missed entirely the way Dani’s gaze drifted to the window, to the plow’s slow progress up the mountain, to the specific, dawning reality of a road that would soon, inevitably, be clear enough to leave.
Dani set her phone face down on the couch cushion, quiet, and reached for the book she’d abandoned earlier, though her eyes didn’t quite settle on the page.
Sedona. A real place. A real date, printed in black and white in an email that had been waiting in the ether the whole time, patient and indifferent, while she’d spent four days letting herself believe, foolishly, dangerously, that this particular bubble might somehow be different from every other stop she’d ever made.
It wasn’t different. It had never actually been different.
It had just felt that way, wrapped in fairy lights and firelight and a woman who touched her like she meant it, and now here was the reminder, arriving right on schedule the way reminders always did, that none of this had ever come with a guarantee.
She didn’t say any of that out loud. She turned a page she hadn’t read, and let Alex keep talking about Cass’s texts, and told herself the tight feeling lodged behind her ribs was nothing, was nerves, was nothing at all worth mentioning yet.
Outside, the plow finished its pass and rumbled off toward some other stretch of road, and the mountain, for the first time in four days, sat in something close to ordinary silence.