Chapter Twenty
Back at camp, there are a lot of messy feelings and not a lot of moments to brief Lyle on what Mitch knows.
Campfire turns into an emotional semi-debriefing where Lori shares her diagnosis to hugs and tears from everyone. “But you’ll still be coming on the capstone trip, right?” Willow asks.
All eyes turn to Lyle and me.
“Lori and I need to discuss it first,” Mitch says diplomatically. But since tomorrow’s the last day before the trip, there’s no time to waste.
Trevor and Petra apologize sincerely to Lori, but seem to have hit a rough patch with each other.
Petra’s rigid and tight-lipped, while Trevor alternates between imploring whispers of “We couldn’t have known” and fresh bouts of sulking every time she refuses to accept his pleas.
Sloane, who’s been pale and silent since seeing Lori hurt, retreats to Sunset Dome, refusing my offer of company.
After campfire, Lyle takes the Mystery Machine to the fallen tree so he can charge his phone while making calls. He’s gone for hours, trying to put logistical solutions in place for a potentially high-needs guest on a trip with limited access to civilization.
I can’t go with him—not when a client’s recently visited the ER. Alone in the tent, I write pro and con lists and disaster plans in Lyle’s field journal. When he gets back, I’ll tell him everything, and we’ll work the problem together.
I wake at sunrise to find our beds pushed together, Lyle’s arm across my waist. His field notes and pen are neatly arranged under my cot, where he must’ve put them when he found me passed out.
My emotions are still a tangled mess, every instinct on high alert after seeing Fisher at the geocaching festival.
I slide out from under his arm to make a morning trek to the groover.
On the path, I catch myself scanning for tiny microphones and sun glinting from hidden lenses, feeling only more paranoid when there’s nothing.
When I get back to the tent, Lyle beckons me to the double sleeping bag he’s made by zipping ours together, his half-lidded eyes dark with promise. It feels good when he makes me forget how worried I am about Lori, Brent, the Love Boat. Our secrets.
Afterward he rolls us over so I can sprawl across his chest while he idly traces the lines of my tattoo—wires leading to switches in a spidery motherboard.
“Do you miss lying on top of someone after sex because I’m too small?”
He gives a quiet half laugh, mostly breath. “It’s a little weird to bring up my sexual past one minute after orgasm.”
I lift my head. “Dodging the question, McHugh?”
He sends me a look. “Hardly. And no. I stopped being able to do that when I was fifteen. It was always kind of awkward at my size.”
“You lost your virginity when you were fifteen?” I kept mine until university. Sneaking around in back seats took time I didn’t have in high school, with classes and work and my mom.
“No.”
My head comes off his chest. “The fuck! Who was banging you at fourteen ?! By the way, we name names in this relationship. No witness protection allowed.”
He smiles at my outrage, or maybe because I used the word “relationship.”
“Britt Carstairs, if you must know. We were counselors at a sleepaway camp for disadvantaged kids. The pay was terrible. I think the owners’ hearts weren’t in it.
The next summer, they renovated the dining hall into a wedding venue.
” Idly, he twists my hair and gives it a tug that makes my skin burst into shivers.
I rest my face in the negative space between his pecs and give in to the pleasure.
“Britt Carstairs,” I prod.
“Right. Well, put a bunch of horny, curious teenagers together with limited adult supervision after lights-out, and there you have sleepaway camp. Britt was sixteen, assumed I was a couple years older, and broke up with me when she realized the age difference went the other way.”
“I hate her.”
Underneath me, his shoulders bump in a shrug.
“People always misjudged my age. When I was a toddler, people in the grocery store would ask my mom why her six-year-old was throwing tantrums like a three-year-old. My friends’ parents freaked out about normal stuff like roughhousing, even though I never hurt anyone by accident.
My high school athletic director got accused of falsifying my age so many times, I quit joining sports teams. There was a lot of pressure for me to live up to my size. ”
I feel how much he doesn’t like these memories in the muscle tension under my cheek, the intake of breath as he lifts his chin. How must it have felt for a kid to always have to be the bigger person—literally?
“You must’ve been so angry,” I whisper into his chest, even though I mostly feel sad for the little boy he was.
“Anger doesn’t get you anywhere. And being big, white, and male isn’t exactly a disadvantage in this world.”
“No, but…” I’m not sure whether I should bring up what happened when he was seventeen.
To me, the important thing wasn’t that he got blamed for a fight he didn’t start.
It was that his family didn’t back him up.
I’m sure they had a lot going on with his brother’s illness, but his own parents should’ve known he was still a child no matter how much he looked like an adult.
He still needed someone to defend him. He needed to believe it wasn’t okay for people to deliberately push him to the breaking point, then claim he scared them when he pushed back.
Especially because I need him to help me push back now. Something’s happening in camp, I’m almost certain.
“McHuge…”
“Uh-oh, fun’s over if it’s ‘McHuge,’” he says, rolling us to face each other and resettling me so my eyes are level with his.
Usually I hate it when people presume to move my body around, but I know he’s not doing it because my small size makes him feel big.
It’s just something he can do to make things easy and kind of lovely.
I wish I didn’t have to ruin the feeling, but it can’t wait. I pick the most urgent item first.
“On the way home from the hospital, we saw Fisher’s crew leaving the geocaching festival.”
“Okay.”
Okay? “We’ve seen him three times in five days. He’s following us somehow. He’s trying to copy the Love Boat.”
He shakes his head, his generous mouth pinched into a conflicted line. “He was at a public festival on a day when any ethical whitewater outfit would have stayed off the river. It could be a coincidence.”
“No. It’s a pattern.”
“Are you sure?” I know he can read my tiny sliver of doubt.
Face softening, he says, “I’m worried about making a fuss when we have no proof.
If we end up in a public battle, I’ll get painted as the big scary angry guy who’s out for revenge.
It’s better to lie low and let this burn itself out if we don’t have hard evidence he’s done anything illegal. ”
He’s talking like a lawyer. Probably quoting his own lawyer from half a lifetime ago, who undoubtedly taught him not to fight back against rumors or trolls—stay quiet, and the gossip mill will find a new target.
My heart twists hard at Lyle once again refusing to defend his boundaries with anyone but me. He gives everybody everything, but he can’t—or won’t—give me this. He promised he’d hold on to me, and instead, he’s holding on to all the voices that ever told him he wasn’t allowed to fight back.
And he’s wearing his necklace again today, like it’s a pair of handcuffs he puts on voluntarily.
“I don’t care if it’s not illegal! It’s wrong ,” I cry, too loudly for the fabric-walled illusion of privacy that’s all we have in this place.
“The plausible deniability is part of it. I’ve been gaslighted like this before.
So have you— by Fisher . This is our livelihood we’re talking about.
This is someone possibly spying on our home .
If they’re willing to take a risk like that, what else are they willing to do? ”
I hate how paranoid I sound. How flimsy and dismissible my own words make me feel, as if my old department chief might jump out of the bushes and scold me to stop being emotional .
An awful sense of impending doom yawns in my chest. The first time a trauma patient told me they felt like they were going to die, I—the lowly medical student—clasped their hand and reassured them we’d take good care of them.
My attending physician freaked the fuck out and repeated every test, successfully diagnosing the internal bleeding that hadn’t been apparent before.
We don’t ignore feelings of doom in emergency medicine. More often than not, they’re right.
Lyle clasps my hand, bringing it to his lips. Those lips have kissed me everywhere, said every good thing to me, told me he cared. Told me I mean something.
But now Lyle’s lips tell me, “If all Fisher’s team has is our geographical locations, they have nothing that matters.
They don’t have my field notes. They don’t have our teachings or debriefings.
Our clients signed NDAs; we can sue them if they steal our confidential course information.
I can’t believe anyone here is a criminal. Can you?”
He hasn’t learned what my dad taught me at age ten: it’s only a crime if you get caught, and laws only matter if you have the power to see them enforced. If we go bankrupt, who’ll pay the lawyers to sue Fisher? No one.
He’s right, though. We have no evidence beyond chance meetings and bad feelings, and I don’t think the Mounties believe in a sense of doom the way we do in medicine.
“I believe you, Stellar. I trust your instincts. But I can’t chase after someone in anger—not ever again.
And we ,” he says, landing hard on the pronoun, “can’t live like this.
We can’t spend our lives holding our arms over the things we create, or we won’t be able to build anything new.
We’re making more than a one-size-fits-all curriculum that we can recycle over and over.
You and I are special together. We’ll create something unique every time. They can’t take that away.”
“But what if the Love Boat dies? What if Fisher kills it?” I hate my voice for shaking.
He presses his broad, hard palm to mine, intertwining our fingers. I can feel the scars that mark his fingertips where they curl around the back of my hand. “Then you and I will be all right.”
Lyle doesn’t understand. He was able to get out of his PhD program and make a career. He recovered.
“What if I’m not all right?” I whisper, the words small and fearful. “I wasn’t last time. And if the Love Boat dies, I can’t afford to stay in Grey Tusk. I’ll have to leave town. Leave Liz.” Leave you , my heart whispers.
“I hope this place doesn’t die.” His voice is so kind. Gentle, like I mean something to him. “But if it does, you won’t die.”
“But something does die,” I say urgently. “They kill a part of you. You’re not the same after that.”
I’ve been undead for a year. Angry and afraid and ashamed for a year . Unable to forgive the people who were supposed to have my back, unable to forgive myself for trusting them.
“You deserved better, Stellar. I won’t minimize how shitty it was for you. But I believe all the best parts of you are still there, waiting. I see them, every day. You can put yourself back together. Surgically, if you have to.”
My laugh has the short wet sound of someone who’s not quite crying.
“I don’t want to burn our days and nights thinking about what they’re doing.
Let’s make us the best we can be,” Lyle murmurs, tempting me to soften in the face of his openhandedness.
But some last fragment of wrath ignites, its fire just hot enough to help me resist. I can’t go along to get along the way I did at the hospital, ignoring the signs because people I shouldn’t have trusted reassured me everything was fine.
Even if this time it’s Lyle telling me everything is fine.
“I want to call Sharon. I’ll take the fall if my suspicions are wrong, but I want her to know what we’ve been seeing.”
“We’ve covered this, Stellar. Sharon can’t do anything.”
“But there must be something . What if we went public?”
“If we go public, we expose ourselves. We’re faking our engagement, for—”
“It’s not fake!”
He shoots me a pained look. “So you proposed because you love me? And you’re definitely planning to marry me?”
I draw back, stung. He knows it’s too soon. I promised him my best; what more can I give?
“Okay then,” he says, releasing my hand to rub his eyes.
“At the very least, our relationship history won’t stand up to serious examination.
Any press coverage could also expose your reputation in the medical community, however unfair and unearned.
My juvenile record, too. Plus the fact that our celebrity endorsement is coming from your sister.
I’m not trying to be an asshole, Stellar, but I have some experience with crisis public relations that you might not.
Once your reputation gets cemented, sometimes nothing can change it. Not even the truth.”
I press my lips together on a wave of nausea. He’s right again: we’re vulnerable, and a lot of our weak spots are my fault. I put a foot wrong—a toe wrong—with the milk and lost my job. What would happen if everything Lyle listed became public knowledge?
Still. “One more thing. One more suspicious thing happens with Fisher, and we call Sharon, fallout or no fallout.”
“Deal.” Lyle eases out of our sleeping bag, leaving me shivering with the rush of cold, damp air. “I’ll start the hot water. You stay here. Get an extra ten minutes of sleep,” he says, tucking me in so I’m cozy and contained like a kitten curled in a hat.
He only has to press his big hands on my shoulders, my ribs, my hip bones, and I’m hypnotized into a half slumber.
We didn’t get to discuss what Mitch knows about Sloane, but what could he do about that, even if he wanted to? I’ll wear sunglasses and stick my hair under a hat so Sloane and I look as different as possible.
And the minute we get back from the overnight, I’ll call Sharon.
Once the guests are safely checked out, we’ll have a week and change to deal with fucking Fisher.
He won’t be able to follow us on the capstone trip, anyway—not after we changed our campsite at the last minute to better accommodate Lori.
It’s reasonable to wait. Lyle will hold on to what matters. We’ll be all right. I say it to myself again, then again, repeating it like a mantra until it’s time to get up.