Chapter 36 Thorn
This might just be the darkest night of my life.
Underneath the canopy of this densely wooded area, the glow of the moon barely breaks through; I’ve been at the mercy of my headlamp for the past couple of hours, only able to see what’s immediately ahead of me.
On the bright side, I can now be confident that what I’ve always claimed is actually true: I know these trails inside and out and could navigate them with my eyes closed.
I’ve covered so much ground tonight that I’m practically sleepwalking right now, coasting on pure adrenaline to keep me moving and alert.
Finally, just down the trail, I see a small campfire.
And, in the firelight, a shadowy figure.
It’s too dark to see much at this distance, and he doesn’t see me yet—he’s facing the fire. I’m fairly certain it’s Matteo, given the build, but it’s hard to tell for sure.
The closer I get, though, the more it looks like whoever’s sitting there is all alone. I squint, trying to make out whether the hulking black blot on the other side of the fire is another person…or just a tree.
“Matty?” I call out. “Is that you?”
It is him—a few more steps and it all comes into focus, Matteo and the fire and the tree I thought might be Joshua—but he doesn’t answer, doesn’t even turn to look at me.
My teeth clench on instinct.
I traipse three hours in the forest, at night, alone, and he can’t even be bothered to say hello?
I join him in the clearing, drop my pack. It lands with a thud, nearly crushing a grasshopper in the process.
Finally, Matteo looks up.
The sight of him is a force: he looks absolutely, utterly spent.
“Where’s Joshua?” I ask.
Clearly, he’s not here.
“Thanks for coming, man,” Matteo says, stoking the fire with a stick, back to avoiding eye contact.
“Where,” I repeat through gritted teeth, “is Joshua?”
I count embers—ten, nine, eight, seven, six—before he finally answers.
“If I said I had no idea, what would you do?”
I can’t tell if he’s taunting me or serious or what. His tone is completely unreadable. Is he sleep-deprived? Delirious? Just an asshole?
“I think I might be more than a little pissed off,” I reply, an understatement.
“Well, then,” he says. “Prepare to be more than a little pissed off.”
A shiver of dread makes my skin tingle.
“I’m listening,” I say, keeping my voice as even as I can.
He makes me wait for what feels like an eternity.
When he finally looks up, I know that whatever’s about to come out of his mouth is the dead-honest truth.
“He went rogue,” Matteo says. “Haven’t seen him since yesterday, and I have no clue where he is now.”
I’m filled with a white-hot flash of rage.
This is so much more than just a little pissed off—this is Matteo losing an entire person.
“You had one job, Matty. What do you mean he ‘went rogue’?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he says, voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Do people usually leave little notes of explanation behind before they ditch people in the middle of the night? Because I sure as hell didn’t get one.
I have no idea. He was there when I fell asleep, and when I woke up, he and his stuff were just gone. ”
It wouldn’t be fair of me to throw an if you’d just paid better attention accusation in his face, because it could have happened to anyone—but I’m sorely tempted.
If Joshua’s been gone since this morning, though, why am I only finding out now? I’m sure he’s miles away, long gone in who knows which direction. Where would we even begin to start looking for him?
CALL ME ASAP! I text Danica, even though she still hasn’t replied to any of my messages from earlier. Joshua’s unaccounted for. I thought he was with Matteo.
“You didn’t think that might have been a relevant detail to mention when you called me?” I say as soon as I’m done. “I left everyone back at camp without a guide so I could come help you and Joshua. You led treks in the Andes, Matty—you shouldn’t need me to come rescue you!”
“He took our only phone charger,” Matteo says bitterly. “And most of the snacks.”
“Again—relevant details.”
“We both know you wouldn’t have come tonight if it was just me out here,” he protests.
He’s right about that much.
“You dug this hole for yourself,” I say. Maybe it’s going a little too far, but it’s the truth. “You were all over Zoe—I’m not surprised he didn’t want to stick around! Just because you’re hurting from Blair doesn’t mean you get to hurt everyone around you, too.”
My words land like the sharpest little blades.
I never meant to say them out loud. I never meant to cut this deep.
Despite everything, all the distance and damage we’ve sustained these last few years—these last few days—he’s still like a brother to me.
Deep down, I think he knows it. Matteo has pressed right up against the limit of what a friendship can come back from, crossed into betrayal territory, doubled down and blamed me for said betrayal, and then went on an emotional bender as soon as Blair broke up with him—
But at the end of the day, I think he knows he’s not beyond forgiveness. He’s right there on the edge…but it all comes down to this, right now. He needs to own up to what he’s done before we can ever begin to mend the canyon-sized rift between us.
He doesn’t speak for a long time.
I take a seat on the ground, wait him out. Grab a handful of trail mix from my pack and make it look like I could do this for as long as it takes even though I’m anxious that Danica hasn’t replied yet, anxious about Joshua.
“I—” Matteo eventually starts, but cuts himself off.
He takes a deep breath. Swallows.
“I should never have said yes to coming out here,” he finally says, staring into the fire like it’s a window to the past, until his eyes suddenly flick up to meet mine. “There are a lot of things I should never have said yes to.”
It’s not an apology, but it’s a start.
After all his avoidance, this direct eye contact feels a bit on the intense side. I don’t break, though: I look and I listen, trying to see inside him so I can finally understand.
“I told myself Blair would be worth it,” he goes on. “She made me feel like my life could be so much more, you know? Like I wasn’t truly living until I took some sort of huge, unexpected leap of faith.”
His gaze shifts back to the fire, back to his memories.
“I didn’t realize how stagnant I’d been feeling,” he says, tucking his hair behind one ear.
“Blair told me her secret one night—a secret she said not even you knew—that she’d bought a one-way ticket to Peru.
She painted the idea of this huge adventure, the thrill of never knowing what comes next, just taking it day by day. ”
He swallows, brows pinching together as he looks down at his hands.
“I’ve never met anyone who lives in the present like Blair,” he continues. “She doesn’t have regrets about her past, she doesn’t worry about her future—she just lives in the moment. So when she asked if I wanted to start over with her in Peru, it sounded pretty magical.”
It’s the most perfect description of Blair, and exactly why I came to the conclusion a long time ago that it would never have worked out between us no matter what—if she hadn’t run off with Matteo, it would have been someone else.
“It’s a lot less magical when you’re the one getting left in the dust,” I say, unable to keep the bitterness from creeping into my voice.
Blair’s flightiness in the name of adventure has always struck me as extremely self-centered. It never mattered who she was leaving behind so long as she kept moving forward—and the farther the better, because that way, she couldn’t even see her old life in the rearview. Out of sight, out of mind.
It’s tough to see how Matteo has changed after spending the last two years with her. He used to be one of the most thoughtful people in my life.
“Yeah,” he says after a moment. “I see that now.”
He pokes at the fire with his stick, setting off a spray of embers that flicker and then disappear. His face, usually so happy-go-lucky—even this week, with everyone but me—is a shadow of itself right now, sullen and unsmiling.
“If I’m honest,” he says, still poking at embers, “I think I always knew how wrong it was, what I did to you.”
He throws the stick into the fire, finally meets my eyes.
“I felt these little stabs of guilt for so long—they started in the airport, before Blair and I ever left, but there were a lot of other times, too.” He shifts his weight, pulls one knee up to his chest. “I told myself Blair would be worth it, though…that the adventure would be worth it. That it was time to choose something for me instead of just tagging along with the career you had chosen here in Cali.”
I take it all in. I’m not sure if it makes me feel better or worse to know he’s felt guilty off and on over the years.
It’s good to know his conscience is still intact, even if he tried to bury it, but the fact that he still got on a plane and went into full-throttle YOLO mode at the first sign of those feelings is disappointing, to say the least.
“Even though I know how she is, I thought I could be the one to keep her—the exception,” Matteo goes on.
“I thought we’d go on adventures together for the rest of our lives, so her breakup texts were a real blindside.
And it’s been miserable, man. How could I have been so stupid?
How could I have thought I was special? I stole my best friend’s girlfriend and then fully believed she wouldn’t leave me in the exact same way. I’m an idiot.”
It feels like a rush of lava, the way everything he’s been holding in is pouring out now, hot and fiery and bright.
“Seeing your face, the day I got her text—I couldn’t handle it, man. I was barely holding it together, trying to process what she’d written, and then there you were, a reminder of all the things I screwed up because I thought Blair would be worth it.”
He blinks rapidly, clearing away the glassiness in his eyes.