Chapter 25
FINN
The old Jeep hasn't been packed this carefully since Dad ran wine deliveries out of it two decades ago.
I've got the tent, the good sleeping bags zipped into one wide double, the camp stove, the lantern, the first-aid kit I've never once needed yet never once traveled without. The big cooler, loaded. Two bottles from our family vault, wrapped in a towel like contraband.
And in the back seat, still wearing tags, a full set of women's gear I had special-delivered from one of my regional flagship stores in Huntington at six this morning.
Shell jacket, wool base layers, a headlamp, gloves.
I run a company that outfits strangers for the wilderness every day of the year.
This is the first time I've packed it for somebody whose comfort and cold hands I plan to take personally.
Bear spray goes in the door pocket. Not because we'll need it. I hope we won't need it.
Colton comes around the equipment barn with a spool of fence wire on his shoulder, sets it in the utility cart, and starts sorting staples into a coffee can like a man with nowhere to be. Other than in my business, that is.
"Two weeks is a long time for you to be hanging around," he says, not looking up.
"What about it?"
A handful of staples rattles into the can. "Longest you've been home since Dad's funeral."
I glance over at him. "Somebody has to supervise the trellis wire."
Nothing. That's the thing about Colton. Evan comes at me with exhibits and a closing argument—things a man can at least fight back on. Colton just asks his question then stands there sorting hardware while my jokes die of exposure on the driveway between us.
"It's a beautiful property," I try. "I'm rediscovering my roots."
The staples rattle. The vines rustle. Somewhere around the back of the house, my mother's kitchen window is open, which means this conversation has an audience whether I can see it or not.
"Is she why you're still here?" Colton says.
He asks it the way he asks whether the north block needs water. No wind-up, no verdict in it, eyes on the coffee can, and the question goes in underhand and lands dead center anyway.
Because yes. Obviously yes. And somewhere on a drafting table in Denver there's a resort with my name all over it and an opportunity window sliding shut over the whole thing, while I'm standing in the driveway loading a cooler for a woman who has to live in this town after whatever I do next.
I make myself look at that, straight on, for as long as I can stand it.
About three seconds, it turns out. Long enough to know the honest sentence: I'm tangled up in something I'm not sure I get to keep.
I set that down carefully next to the bear spray and close the tailgate.
"Ask me about all this on Sunday," I tell him.
Colton looks at me for the first time in the whole conversation. Whatever he finds, he doesn't say. He nods once, picks up the wire spool, and heads for the fence line.
"Bring the cooler back," he says over his shoulder.
In this family, that's a blessing. I take it and go to pick up Darcy.
She comes down the stairs beside the bookshop at five sharp, one duffel over her shoulder, and I forget what I was going to say.
Faded jeans. Honest-to-God broken-in hiking boots, and a soft moss-colored henley with the sleeves shoved up, with her wavy brown hair twisted in a knot she'll lose by the first trailhead.
I've now seen this woman in a wrap dress, in teacher cardigans, in candlelight, and in nothing at all, and it turns out the version that guts me on a Friday afternoon is ready-for-anything Darcy standing on a curb with her chin up and a big smile on her face.
"Before you say one word," she says, walking up, "I packed light, I'm dressed for whatever you have in mind, and I have questions."
"You can have three."
She stops at the back of the Jeep, and I watch her eyes go over the cargo, the stove, the lantern case, the two rolled sleeping pads, and land on the tent bag, which is the size of a Labrador.
Her mouth opens. Closes. I hold still and let her get all the way there, and there's a small braced thing in my chest while she does, because this is the moment she either lights up or asks how far the nearest hotel is.
"Finn." She looks up at me. "Are we going camping?"
"We're going camping."
Her face is doing something complicated, and then it resolves into delight. "I've never been camping in my life. Are you aware that you're dating a woman who considers the farmers market roughing it?"
Dating her. That's the first time she's ever acknowledged what's going on between us, and I have to admit, I like the sound of it. Far as I'm concerned, dating only scratches the surface of what we're doing together, but I'll take it.
"So, what you're saying is I'm going to be your first." I can't keep the grin down and I stop trying. "I like it. That's your first question, by the way."
"That wasn't a question, that was an inventory." She points into the door pocket. "Oh my God. That. That's my first question. Is that bear spray?"
"It is."
She's reaching for the door handle when she sees the back seat, and stops. The shell jacket. The base layers folded in their wrapping, the headlamp, the gloves, all of it new, all of it obviously not mine, tags still on.
"Finn." Her voice has changed registers. "Whose stuff is all that?"
"Yours. I guessed on your sizes." I say it like it's logistics, because if I say it any other way I'm going to say too much. "It gets cold on the mountain at night. I wasn't going to have you cold on my watch."
She looks at the little pile of gear for a long moment, and then at me, and whatever she's thinking puts that shine back in her eyes. She covers it the way she tends to do, with cross-examination.
Then she points at the door pocket again. "What exactly are we going to be doing this weekend that involves bears, Finn?"
"Statistically? Nothing. Black bears want your cooler, not you, and they want no part of anything that smells like people." I take her duffel off her shoulder and hand her up into the passenger seat. "But I don't take chances with things I can't replace."
She goes quiet for a second, looking down at me from the seat, and I watch her decide to hear that the way I meant it.
"And if a bear defies your statistics?" she asks, softer.
"Then it'll have to come through me first."
I say it plainly, because it's not a line, it's the job description. Her eyes hold mine, gold-flecked and steady, and something passes between us that has nothing to do with wildlife.
"Okay," she says, the same way she said it in my bedroom last night, small word, whole flag planted. Then, teacher-brisk: "Question two. Where are we going?"
"North." I shut her door and round the hood. "You’re out of questions, so that's all you get until the signs give me away."
Obviously, she has no respect for the three-question rule. The interrogation starts before we clear town.
"North. Connecticut is north. Are we taking a ferry?"
"No ferry."
"Vermont. You strike me as a man with opinions about Vermont."
"Strong opinions. But not Vermont."
"Are there beds where we're going?"
"There's a bed situation."
"A situation." She turns in her seat to face me fully, delighted and appalled. "Finn, a bed is not supposed to be a situation."
"You'll like this situation."
She narrows the field question by question for most of an hour, and when the first Catskills marker sails past she smacks the dash in triumph.
"The Catskills! You're taking me up a mountain?"
"A modest one. There's a spot I've been saving.
" And that's true in a way I don't examine too closely, because I've camped on five continents and never once brought another person to this one.
"You'll see it tomorrow in daylight. That's the whole reveal.
Don't ask me the elevation, you'll just use it against me. "
"I would never." She absolutely would. She settles back, victorious, and twenty minutes later her boots are off and her socked feet are up on my dash, which in the Ferrari would be grounds for ejection if she were anyone else, but in this Jeep her comfort looks like the entire point of the vehicle.
I keep my eyes on the road and mostly succeed.
But the setting sun's coming through her window and lighting her profile gold, and the sleeping bags in the back are zipped into one wide double, a decision I made this morning with a completely straight face, and my mind keeps drifting to tonight: a tent, a lantern, this woman, and no town for forty miles.
Last night I learned what she looks like falling apart in candlelight.
Tonight I get to find out what she sounds like when the only other thing making noise is the nature that surrounds us.
The light goes long and gold. The road empties out. She DJs badly and with total confidence, steals sips of my gas-station coffee, and tells me about her juniors performing the Macbeth murder scene with sound effects.
"Owen did the knocking at the gate on his desk.
Full commitment. And then Lisa, my quiet one, my sure-thing-valedictorian, does the scream.
" She demonstrates a modest classroom scream, in the car, with total sincerity, and I nearly take out a mile marker.
"The vice principal came to my door, Finn.
I had to explain Shakespeare to administration through the window like a hostage. "
I'm laughing at highway speed, the real kind that starts in the chest, and she looks pleased with herself the way she does when a lesson lands.
Somewhere past the last of the bridge traffic she goes quiet, watching the hills come up in the windshield with her hand resting on my forearm like it lives there.
I've made this drive before. Versions of it, anyway, on better roads and worse ones, in machines that cost more than houses, toward peaks with real elevation and my name on somebody's manifest. Every single time, the best part was the leaving.
Watching whatever town it was get small behind me, feeling the tether snap, the old escape-velocity high.
Mattichogue is an hour behind us and shrinking, and I keep checking the rearview, waiting for the high.
It doesn't come. What comes instead is quieter and bigger and sits in my chest like ballast, steadying everything. For the first time in my life, leaving doesn't feel like getting away. It feels like heading toward something.
Her thumb moves on my forearm. The hills open up.
I put my foot down and drive toward it.