SLOANE
I drive for a while without any destination in mind. Around the lake, past cabins, tourist shops, and families with beach gear spilling out of their cars. And for a minute, I hate all the happiness and sunshine and even the blue water for being so beautiful when I feel this hollow.
My parents forgot my seventeenth birthday when they were in Jordan on a dig, so I celebrated by going to a random party and drinking until I couldn’t feel the sting from their disinterest. Because it felt more like a response to my inherent lacking than any deficiency on their part.
When I got my diagnosis, I went home and reorganized the entire fiction section of Cover to Cover, staying up until three in the morning, because shelving books by subgenre gave me a thing to control when my own cells had taken up arms against me.
Filling empty spaces is what I do. With a drink, a project, my friends, and community. I throw myself into all of it so I don’t have to sit with the silence long enough to hear what it’s actually saying.
Kristen Quinn’s book was one of those things.
I underlined passages and dog-eared pages, which is kind of a cardinal sin in my line of work.
I memorized her words and whispered them to myself on the nights when the nausea was so savage I couldn’t keep water down.
I told myself that if this woman could face her fears and come out whole on the other side, so could I.
And I guess she did face them. But by her own admission, the transformation I projected onto her was all in my head. I needed a hero, and she was right there on the shelf, conveniently packaged in palatable snippets of inspiration that promised what I was desperate to hear.
I should have stuck to silence. If it all meant so little to her, why did it mean so much to me?
A couple of hours later, I pull into the driveway of the rental house and turn off the engine, but don’t go inside.
The lake appears silver through the trees, and I watch dappled light make its surface glow while the car’s interior grows stifling, baking in the afternoon sun.
I feel stupid and rejected in a way I haven’t let myself since I was a kid.
The girl who believed that if she just tried hard enough and showed up with enough enthusiasm, the people she adored would see her and love her back.
My mom used to look at me with this expression I could never fully decode—half-amused, half-bewildered, like she couldn’t quite figure out how she’d produced a child who cared so much about everything. You feel things too deeply, Sloane. It’s going to hurt you one day.
Lots of days, turns out.
And here I am again, as if her words were more prophecy than warning. I allowed my feelings for the words of a book to transform the author into my Emerald City, then drove across multiple states for her to admit that she’s nothing more than the woman behind the curtain.
Dorothy Gale much?
I press my forehead to the steering wheel.
Here we are, back to my sorry habit of attaching myself to things and people and ideas because I can’t manage to believe I’m enough on my own.
Is Jensen another version of this same sad song? An anchor I’m gripping with both hands because the alternative is floating alone in open water to find out whether I can actually swim.
The thought makes my head pound so hard I have to close my eyes against it.
Jensen doesn’t weigh me down. He makes me feel like the woman I became on the trail with him might exist outside her bubble of borrowed courage and fictional words.
But I felt that way about Kristen, too, and look how that turned out. What happens when the man who already lost one woman to cancer realizes he doesn’t want to take that chance again?
The passenger door opens, and as if I summoned him to me, Jensen folds himself into the passenger seat, leaving the door ajar. He doesn’t say anything, just settles in, like hanging out in a parked car in a driveway is a perfectly normal activity.
“What are you doing?” I ask without lifting my head from the steering wheel.
“I definitely haven’t been glancing out the front window every ten minutes like a dad waiting for his kid to come home safe from prom.” He stretches his legs as far as the compact SUV will allow, which isn’t far. “Turns out Cody’s right about the grumpy old man thing.”
A laugh bubbles up from my throat, which is a miracle given how I feel. “You’re distinguished.”
“I’ll accept that, but only from you.”
I can feel his eyes on me even with my face still angled toward my lap. “How’d it go?” he asks.
He has to know based on…well…me, but I appreciate the question.
“She was fine,” I say, sitting back against the seat but not meeting his gaze.
“She just didn’t care. Not about me specifically—not about any of it.
Writing the book was a job, and her bravery was the story that sold it.
She faced her fears and then went home as the same scared person she’d always been.
” I sound bitter and don’t know how to stem the tide of devastation rolling through me.
“She told me she doesn’t want to be anyone’s hero. ”
Jensen doesn’t rush to fill the ensuing silence or offer platitudes before I’m finished falling apart, and I love that about him. Add it to the damn list.
“I feel so stupid.” A tear slips down my cheek, and I swipe at it with the back of my hand.
“I spent over a year idolizing this woman, then hiked four days through the mountains and drove fifteen hours in my quest to prove I was worthy of what her words meant to me. And she’s just an author who wrote a book because the concept was marketable, so a publisher gave her a lot of money.
” Another tear, and this one I let fall.
Fighting it is taking energy I don’t have.
“I made her into this shining answer to questions I should’ve been figuring out for myself. ”
“Sloane.” He reaches across the console and wraps his big hand around both of mine.
“Don’t be nice to me right now. I’ll totally lose it.”
“That’s okay with me.” His thumb traces a slow circle on my knuckle, and I press my lips together hard to stem more tears.
“A book inspired you to be brave, and you did something most people wouldn’t dream of.
Multiple things. You started a book club and pushed your friends to face their fears.
They did that because you believed in them first.”
“That’s not—”
“You fought cancer, and you’re winning. Every day, you’re winning. So how come you’re sitting here feeling like you failed because a stranger didn’t live up to the person you imagined?” He shakes his head. “You don’t need her. You never did. Everything you thought she gave you was already yours.”
I feel my chin tremble and bite down on my lower lip hard enough to feel the sting.
“I should have just watched The Wizard of Oz,” I mutter. “It would have been easier.”
“You don’t want easy.”
His tone is rougher than usual, and I look at him fully for the first time since he got in the car.
The afternoon light catches the silver threaded through the dark hair at his temples, sharpening the hard lines of his face, while his storm-gray eyes pin me in place with an intensity that steals my breath.
“You climbed into the wilderness alone, carrying enough fear to crush most people, and you kept going anyway. You don’t take the safe route through life, Sloane.
You meet it head-on.” He shakes his head slightly.
“You’re the most inspiring person I’ve ever met.
And not because you beat a disease or hiked a mountain.
It’s because you keep showing up with your whole heart, even after life gives you reasons not to. ”
The tears are falling freely now, and I don’t bother wiping them away.
“You don’t need a lighthouse,” he says quietly. “You’re the brightest thing I can imagine.”
I can’t speak, so I sit in the rental car, holding the hand of a man who somehow sees me more clearly than I’ve ever seen myself.
A minute passes, maybe two. I take a shaky breath and wipe my face, then let out an exhale that carries the bulk of the weight I’ve been holding since I walked out of that bungalow.
“So what do I do now that I’m my own lighthouse?” I ask, scrunching up my nose.
Jensen leans back in the passenger seat, his eyes lit with emotion I’m not brave enough to name yet.
“How about we go dancing?”
I laugh, surprised and a little watery. “Here? Tonight?”
“Do you have other plans?”
“No, but…” I’m still trying to connect the dots in his logic.
“We need to get you out of your head,” he says, tapping one long finger to my forehead. The slow smile he gives me is the best thing I’ve seen all day. “Please let me take you dancing.”
Maybe Kristen Quinn was right. Whatever I found in those pages wasn’t about her. It was me taking what I needed to find the strength I didn’t know I had.
And maybe Jensen isn’t something I’m clinging to because I’m afraid to stand on my own. Maybe he makes me feel brave enough to find the answers all on my own.
“Yeah,” I whisper, warmth spreading through the hollow parts inside me. “Let’s go dancing.”