Chapter 14 Rowan
ROWAN
I’m in my bedroom, still trying to cool down, when I hear the smoke alarm go off.
At first, when I hear it, I’m not quite sure what it is. I’ve grown so unaccustomed to hearing noises like that — so far from the sirens and beeping of the city — that it’s a few seconds before I realize, alarm. And then, a second later, fire.
“Lola!” I call, running out into the hall. Cheese chases after me, barking in the excitement, clearly not sure what the hell is going on. We’re a lot alike in that way.
When she doesn’t answer, I call again, “Lola!”
Did she light my house on fire? The moment I think it, I know it’s not true.
This woman is a lot of things — frustrating and intoxicating among them — but she’s not an arsonist. Maybe my sister would tell me that you can never truly know if someone is an arsonist just by looking at them, but I know.
“In here!” Lola calls back, after the second shout, and I turn, running into the kitchen, because duh. If she’s starting a fire, it’s probably in the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” I ask through the smoke, which only gets thicker the closer I am to her. She has the door to the oven open, and her face is almost comically covered in ash as she coughs, clearly trying to do something with the wood inside.
“I was—” But she’s cut off by the coughing.
I grab her under the armpits and drag her up and away from the oven, then turn back and kick its little door shut with my foot, sealing off the fire and sending the smoke where it should be going — up the oven’s chimney, vented out, and released on the side of the mountain, about a football field away from my place.
Shaking my head, I move to the windows, pulling them open. Lola tries to join me, but she’s still coughing too hard to be much help, so I gesture for her to sit down and for once she listens, dragging the collar of her shirt up and over her mouth and nose. A good idea.
Once all the windows are open, and I’ve turned off the fire alarms, the cabin feels eerily silent, filled with nothing but the sounds of the leaves rustling outside.
“Lola,” I say, shaking my head at her when the chaos is finally controlled. She sits at the dinner nook, turned sideways in her chair, her elbows propped on her knees. “What were you thinking?”
“I was…” She closes her eyes, shakes her head. Her hair is blown back from her face and streaked with soot. Was she trying to stoke the fire in the oven? “I wanted to make you dinner. As a thank you. For letting me stay here while my ankle gets better—”
Her words cut off, and she starts to cry.
“Hey,” I say, softening instantly, feeling like an asshole for… well, everything. Yelling at her over the bear. Walking away earlier when it must have been obvious to her that I wanted to kiss her. Coming in like this, shouting at her more. “It’s okay, hey.”
But she’s crying too hard to be easily consolable, her face fully in her palms.
“I can’t do anything right,” she says, her words coming out through great heaving sobs. “I just… I’m not…”
I could keep telling her it’s okay, could stand there and awkwardly pat her back, but it’s not going to help. I think about what my sister would do, then move to the sink, rinsing a cloth with cool water.
When I hand it to Lola, the movement cuts through her heavy breathing, and she looks at me curiously, her gaze skipping from my face to the cloth. So I take it, holding it against her forehead, then laying it over the back of her neck, showing her how it can help.
After that, I go through the motions of making her a mug of tea. I might as well be English for how much tea I’ve made this week, but I’m glad I have it. A warm drink to soothe her.
To make the tea, I have to move the blackened thing on the stove top to the side — whatever she was trying to make us for dinner, I assume. A few minutes later, the tea bag is steeping, and I’m turning back to Lola.
When I do, I realize she’s staring up at me, the wet cloth held limply in her hand. She opens her mouth to speak, but before she can, I start.
Maybe she’s crying because of the fire or because of the incident with the bear cub, but I know me walking away from that kiss has a lot to do with it. That it hurt her feelings, made her think it was her and not me.
I know I have to get this out first.
“My last relationship didn’t end well,” I say, watching her eyes widen.
She’s so damn curious — run toward a bear cub curious — and this information is the first thing that actually makes her breathing start to slow.
An explanation for why I just turned around out there, left her standing in the hall, alone.
“Oh yeah?” she whispers, taking the mug from me and taking a slow sip. I watch her shoulders relax and feel my own mimic the movement.
“Yeah,” I say, surprised at how easily the words come. “She was brilliant. We went to grad school together.”
Lola raises an eyebrow. “Was she studying medicine too?”
“No,” I admit, clearing my throat. “I double majored in biology and computer science during undergrad. I excelled in my technology classes and found them super interesting. But my dad was a doctor, and I wanted to make him proud, so I took biology and pre-med courses, too, to follow in his footsteps. Tragically, my parents died while driving home from my college graduation. I had applied to both medical and technology graduate programs and… well, I had to make a choice.”
I feel weird, standing in the middle of the kitchen talking to her like this, so I come to the nook and sit down with her, holding my own mug of tea in both hands.
“It was a tough decision. I couldn’t see myself being a doctor, really, even though my dad would have loved it. But in a way, I felt obligated to try. After the funeral, Belle, my sister pulled me aside, said that our parents would have been proud of me no matter what I did after college.”
Now that I’ve started talking, it’s like I can’t stop, and Lola is looking at me with wide, tear-rimmed eyes, like she wants nothing more than for me to go on, so I do.
“So, I went to the computer science program at MIT. I met her the first day there, but we didn’t hit it off. It wasn’t until after I met Elliot that she seemed interested in me.”
Lola mouths Elliot to herself, a curious look on her face, and I know that I can’t put it off any longer, so I sigh and say, “I’m— uh— if you recognize the name Henry Travis, then this might mean something to you.”
“I do,” she says softly, looking down at her tea. “You disappeared.”
I nod. “Yeah. Well, when your fiancée cheats on you with your best friend, and they both try to frame you for the fraud and embezzlement they’d been committing for the past two years — while sleeping together — it’s just easier to hide in the mountains.”
Lola’s mouth has dropped open. “They framed you?”
“Tried to,” I say, feeling hints of that old rage rising up inside me.
“Yeah, they did. Planted all sorts of stuff on my computer, trashed my public image. The thing is, the financial implications of the fraud didn’t just impact the higher-ups.
Stocks plummeted, and the whole market took a hit from the feeling of uncertainty. People lost their jobs. Good people.”
Lola nods, then shakes her head. “I remember seeing some stuff about it. I never— I mean, it’s not the sort of thing I normally care about. Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I laugh, scrub my hand through my hair. “It’s good to know there are some people who don’t care that much.”
“I do care, though,” she says, standing up and coming over to me, her eyes serious. “I’m glad you told me, Ro— Do you still want me to call you Rowan?”
At first, when I insisted that people start calling me by my middle name, it felt weird. My sister — during the brief window of time I stayed with her — hated it.
But now, hearing it from Lola’s lips, it feels right, so I nod back.
“You know,” she says slowly, looking at me carefully. “I don’t think you should hide forever, Rowan.”
My chest tightens. Of course, I’ve thought about the things I miss. I love being up here at the cabin and would never go back to living in some concrete, high-rise condo, but there are aspects of my old life that I long for.
It would be nice to see my sister. To sit in a movie theater with a bucket of popcorn in my lap. To walk through a farmers’ market and pick out my own fresh fruits and vegetables, rather than getting them only once a month from Pete.
Lola stares down at me like she wants to continue what we were doing in the hallway earlier.
“My last relationship ended as badly as it could have, I think,” I mutter, looking up at Lola, this storm of a woman who’s blown into my home and turned my life into something interesting again. Who has made me even consider the idea of venturing outside the fence around this property.
“Yeah?” she asks, quirking an eyebrow, grinning at me like she has something planned. “Well, do you want to get that taste out of your mouth?”