SLOANE
Seven hours after Jensen walked out of my hospital room, the doctors decided I was healthy enough to leave even though my heart was still bleeding out all over the floor. Apparently, there’s no scan for that.
Jeremy handled the discharge paperwork, and Avah held my hand in the wheelchair the hospital insisted on.
Iris didn’t say another word about Kristen Quinn’s ass-kicking potential, which told me she’d been truly worried.
After a stop back to the empty rental house, where I stayed in the car because just…
no…we flew home on Jeremy’s jet. I kept my eyes shut the whole flight and let them think I was asleep.
Dodging sympathy from three people at once felt like more effort than I could give.
It’s been two days since I watched Jensen walk through that door while I gripped the hospital blanket so hard my knuckles ached.
I’m sitting on the sofa in my apartment above Cover to Cover, surrounded by the women I love, and giving myself a mental pep talk about how to share the story of the past week without falling apart.
Physically, I’m better. Emotionally? Still a train wreck.
I’ve tried to go about life as normal. Showering and brushing my teeth (not up for flossing yet). Running the bookstore (God, I missed those shelves). Eating the food my friends have been dropping off as an excuse to check up on me (mostly carbs, bless them).
I texted the group chat earlier and asked if anyone was available for a last-minute meeting at my apartment. It took less than fifteen seconds for six yeses to appear on the screen.
Molly arrived first with wine and sparkling cider. Then Sadie and Iris, Taylor and Piper—whose belly has gotten noticeably rounder since I left for Montana—and finally Avah, who walked in, deposited a plate of brownies on the counter and said, “Don’t leave out one minuscule moment.”
I gave each of them an update when we got to Tahoe, but they seem happy to listen again.
Recounting the details of my days on the trail lets me hold onto the moments a little longer, but every memory comes with the dull pain of knowing I can’t get them back.
I miss how happy I was out there with Jensen. I miss everything about him.
Then I tell them about Kristen Quinn, a part of the story none of them, even Avah, has heard.
“She was…” I search for the right word then laugh softly.
“Nothing. Nothing like I expected. Not at all how I wanted her to be. She wasn’t fake exactly, but the book made it sound like she’d discovered some secret to fearless living.
Really, she had deadlines and a publisher who’d given her a big advance. ”
“Sounds like a skank,” Iris says.
“We need to retire that word,” Sadie murmurs.
“No, we don’t.” Iris crosses her ankles. “Not when it fits.”
“How did you feel?” Piper asks, fingers drumming on her round belly. “After meeting with her?”
Pressing my lips together, I stare at the macramé plant holder in the corner. “Devastated. And then furious. And then…” I exhale. “Kind of free? Like the thing I’d been chasing was never real, but the person I became while chasing it is.”
“That’s actually beautiful,” Taylor says, then sighs dreamily. “Seriously, Sloane. You should write your own book.”
“Jensen said something similar.” My voice catches on his name, and the energy in the room shifts. Or maybe that’s another piece of my heart crumbling to the floor.
“Speaking of Jensen,” Molly says, and I feel every one of my friends perk up. Oh, yeah. This is the part I’ve been dreading. “We heard about your trail adventures.”
“Pretty sure you left out some naughty bits,” Piper adds.
Molly nods. “We’ll get to those. But first, where did you leave things with him?”
Avah and Iris, who witnessed how I left things, are kind enough not to make faces or eye contact with me while I consider how to answer.
I take a sip of wine and decide deflection is the best course of action. “For the record, I’m still pissed you sent him after me.”
Molly blinks, then looks contrite. “We gave him an option. He made the choice for himself.”
“And you aren’t pissed,” Avah adds.
She’s a little bit right. I’m not pissed at them.
I’m pissed at myself for letting him in.
For letting my guard down on a mountain in Montana like the big sky erased every lesson I’ve ever learned about self-preservation.
Our two-night stand in Nashville was hard enough to get over.
I spent fourteen months convincing myself it was a cancer-trauma-induced fever dream, and then he showed up on the trail with candy and Walden and the uncanny ability to maneuver through every wall I’ve ever built.
And I fell for him all over again.
“We had fun,” I say, which is a laughable understatement.
“Fun,” Sadie repeats softly.
Avah snorts. “Are you sure that’s the word you want to use?”
Yeah, I’m not fooling anyone, least of all myself.
“It was fun. He made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt. And he also made me feel like I’m strong and capable. Someone worth choosing.”
“Considering the lengths he took to find you,” Avah says, “that’s one hell of an understatement.”
“Why do you have to get over him?” Taylor asks.
I clutch the chair’s throw pillow to my stomach as I think about the look in his eyes when I woke up in that hospital bed. As if I can press away the sick feeling that’s churning inside me.
“Because I refuse to be another person he feels responsible for.” I place the wineglass on the end table when my fingers start to tremble.
“Jensen was a teenager when his mom got sick, and he put his life on hold to take care of her. I’m pretty sure he’s spent the past couple of decades repeating that pattern. ”
The room is quiet, but I don’t glance up.
“I don’t want to become his next project,” I continue, my voice thin. “The broken bird he can’t resist rescuing because it’s the only love language he’s ever learned.”
“Is that what you think you are?” Piper asks. “A broken bird?”
“I think that’s what my body makes me look like.”
“You kicked cancer’s ass and then hiked through bear country for four days,” Iris points out. “That’s not broken, Sloane. That’s badass.”
“And it put me in the hospital.” I press my thumbnail into the seam of the pillow. “I don’t want to feel like I’m a burden. I know how he is. Being with me means worrying every time I sneeze. He shouldn’t have to do it again.”
“I don’t get the impression that’s how he thinks about you.
” Avah shakes her head. “It isn’t how any of us think about you.
You built a skank author”—she raises a hand to cut off Sadie’s protest—“up in your head. It seems like Jensen did something similar with you after Nashville, only you lived up to it.”
“Until he had to rush me to the hospital.”
“When people love you, they want to take care of you,” Sadie says. “Not because we think you can’t take care of yourself, sweetie, but because sometimes that’s what love looks like.”
“He never said he loves me,” I protest weakly.
“He told you in a lot of other ways,” Taylor counters.
The words settle into place, where all the fears I’ve carried since long before my diagnosis are curled up and waiting. The scariest one of all rises to the surface. What if he sees all of me, even the shadows I’ve spent years hiding behind my sunshine, and it changes how he feels?
Jensen met a girl in a bar who gave him a fake name and left before he recognized anything real.
I was strong and brave on the trail because I had a mission.
But there have been nights I ended up on the bathroom floor long before cancer was part of the equation.
When I felt too sad to do anything else.
I’m not all sunshine, and I’ve never let anyone see the broken pieces. Jensen makes me want to give him everything, but my everything has always been too much. I’m not sure I could survive seeing him look at me like that.
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Piper adds, “but you touched his gnarly feet. That’s way more commitment than a ride to the ER.”
I laugh through my grimace. “It’s not the same thing.”
“In your mind,” Iris says. “But maybe not in his.”
Taylor, who’s sitting closest to me on the sofa, places her wine glass on the coffee table and peels my hand off the pillow.
“We all know what it’s like to live inside the boxes life shoved us into when we were younger.
” She squeezes gently. “Sometimes it’s hard to make your way out until someone opens the lid. ”
My throat tightens.
“You’re a lid opener,” Molly confirms. “For all of us, Sloane. Not because you got sick, but because of how you handled being sick. Your bravery, even though we knew you were scared, made us want to be brave.”
“Some of us you forced,” Piper mutters. “Which was rude, but possibly necessary.”
Iris nods. “It’s our turn to tell you to get your head out of your ass.”
I laugh and dab at the corner of one eye. These women have earned the right to call me out.
“The delivery lacks subtlety,” Sadie muses, “but they aren’t wrong.”
“I sent him away,” I say as if they don’t realize it. “Which might be worse than running away myself. I told him he was a babysitter whose shift had ended. I was horrible.”
“You were scared,” Molly asserts.
“I was cruel.”
“Both can be true,” Iris offers.
The tears are flowing freely now, and I don’t try to hold them back. I’m sick of holding back.
Taylor pulls out her phone. “We need to talk about the song.”
She taps the screen, and a few seconds later, Cody Cassidy’s voice fills my apartment, and I’m reminded why people lose their minds over him.
I will find you, he sings.
Down some road I haven’t driven, in some life I haven’t lived yet, I will find you.
Past the door you walked out of, through the dark, and all the distance.
If it takes a million miles, I will find you.
The song is disarmingly intimate, like a handwritten letter in a world full of texts.
But I feel like I’m missing something. I like Cody well enough, but what does his country power ballad have to do with the current state of my life and broken heart? “There’s no question why it was a hit.”
Taylor pauses the song, and the silence stretches until it’s almost unbearable.
“What’s going on?” I demand.
“Do you know who wrote that song?” Molly asks.
I shake my head. “Cody, I assume.”
“Cody sang the hell out of it,” Iris tells me. “But those are Jensen’s words.”
The air leaves my lungs in a sharp rush. Memories of him crash into me like a tidal wave. His voice in the dark, a hand at my back, the heat of him beside me in the cold.
“What?” A shiver ripples up my spine, as if I’m back in that freezing tent with just one person who can keep me warm.
“The song is the reason we sent him after you,” Avah says.
My brain categorically rejects this information. Jensen wrote “I Will Find You”? And he never mentioned it? The man is so hell-bent on tamping down his talent in order to make other people shine, I want to shake him. Except the shaking will have to wait because…
“How do you know it’s about me?”
“One…duh,” Avah says. “And two, Cody told me when they came into The Sugar Shack the morning you left town. Jensen tried to shut him up, but Cody doesn’t take direction well.”
“Play the rest,” I command, my voice hoarse.
I listen to the chorus cycle back around, and this time every word registers differently.
Down some road I haven’t driven.
In some life I haven’t lived.
When the song ends, my apartment is quiet except for the ambient noise of Main Street through the old windows—a car passing, someone laughing on the sidewalk… The ordinary sounds of a town that doesn’t know how a song just unraveled every truth I thought I knew.
Taylor wraps her hand around mine more tightly. “He wrote it for you, Sloane. And he did find you again. He saw all the things you’re afraid make you too much to love, and he kept showing up anyway. Because of who you are.”
The tears I’ve been holding back spill over, and I don’t wipe them away. There’s no need to pretend for people who’ve seen me at my worst and love me anyway.
“I don’t know if I’m brave enough,” I admit. “To let him in.”
“You hiked into grizzly country alone,” Piper says. “You’re brave enough.”
“That was different. It was physical. This is—”
“Harder,” Taylor finishes.
She would know. Taylor understands that sometimes being loved well can feel more frightening than being alone. All of them do.
I look at these women who have been here any time I need them.
Piper, who had to be brave enough to let herself be happy.
Iris, with her love language that is part brutal honesty and part unwavering loyalty.
Molly lost her husband and rebuilt her life without losing the softness that makes her Molly.
Sadie let herself be loved by a man she never expected.
Taylor stopped hiding. Avah found her joy.
Every one of them chose the scary thing. They let someone see the parts they’d been protecting.
“You have the map to him now,” Avah says, raising a brow. “It might be time to use it.”
I want that down to my bones. I want to show up at his door and tell him I’m not a project and he’s not a caretaker. I want to tell him his value isn’t in what he provides, but in who he is. But wanting a person and being brave enough to reach for them are two different things.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, like my heart hasn’t already locked in.
“Liar,” Avah says, but she’s smiling.
After they leave, with promises to check in tomorrow and threats to drag me to brunch if I try to isolate, I stand at the window and look down at Main Street.
Skylark is quiet at this hour, the shops dark, the hanging baskets of flowers just shadows in the streetlights.
It looks the same as it did before I left.
But I’m not the same.
I stepped onto that trail needing to prove I’m not fragile. And I did. But I’ve also spent way too much energy trying to decide which parts of me deserved love. Jensen was there for all of them.
Until I told him to go.
I press my forehead against the glass.
Am I brave enough to step up with everything I am and say, choose me? Claim me.
I’m not sure, but tonight the wanting is louder than the fear. Not by much. Not enough to pick up the phone or buy a plane ticket or do anything reckless and grand. Yet.
But I know for certain that safety isn’t what I’m after. I want more.