Andi sighs and tilts her head back. My stomach clenches.
“Yeah,” she finally says. “I guess? I don’t really have a plan, and I broke my lease anyway because—”
She cuts off suddenly, goes still and quiet. I wait. I’m good at that.
“It was kind of impulsive,” she says, after a beat. “My roommate and I weren’t getting along, and then Lucia broke her knee and coming down here to help out seemed like a good way to get out of there, so… here I am.”
“Ah,” I say, because something needs to be said. I remind myself to breathe through the buzzing of relief in my chest, the wild thumping of my heart.
“New York is hard unless you’re rich,” Andi goes on, still not looking over at me. She sounds defensive, like she thinks I’m judging her. “A lot of my friends moved away to have kids and stuff, and the ones who are still there are reallydriven, you know, one’s a human rights lawyer, and one works for the Met, and one is probably going to be running Simon and Schuster in ten years, and I’m… chaining myself to trees in blizzards.”
“Some people might say that’sverydriven,” I point out, and Andi snorts.
“It really wasn’t,” she says. “It sounded kind of fun and I’d never done it before, so I said yes. The way I do everything.”
I watch her for a moment, the profile that’s become desperately familiar over the past week. It’s warm enough today—in the low 40s—that she’s got her scarf and her hat off, stray hairs drifting around her face.It sounded fun and I’d never done it before, she said, and the thought makes me feel weightless.
“Was it?” I ask, and she turns to look at me, sky-blue eyes reflecting the gray sky. Shit. “Fun,” I finish.
“The first night was kind of exciting, while Chloe was there and we were chained to a tree,” she says. “But then she left and it started snowing and some asshole picked me up and then made me hike formilesthrough the snow to a tiny cabin with no electricity.”
“You’rewelcome,” I say, and I can’t keep the smile out of my voice, and it’s okay because Andi laughs.
“It’s been an adventure, that’s for sure,” she says, and I don’t sayit always was, with you. “But I’m also pretty excited for a shower tomorrow night.”
“Just a shower?”
“That’s after I flip every light switch in Lucia’s house. And turn the heat up to eighty. Ugh, and check my text mess—"
She’s interrupted by a loud, screaming grunt that echoes through the woods and makes Andi freeze, her eyes wide.
“Thefuck—”
“Hog,” I say, already getting to my feet, brushing my hands on my pants as I look around for it.
“Is it possessed?” Andi asks, also getting up.
“Maybe,” I say, and then: “Fuck.”
It’s about a hundred feet away, tangled in the grouse net and churning up mud with its hooves, and grunt-squealing to raise the dead.
It’s also, very possibly, the biggest fucking hog I’ve ever seen.
“Oh,” Andi says, staring. “Fuck.”
And after a few more moments: “You know, I thought it would have tusks.”
“That’s boars.”
“Do we have those too?”
“Not this far north,” I say, distracted, standing behind this boulder and watching this pig scream in the mud and fight the net. “They’re native to Europe and Asia. They were introduced to North America as big game animals so people could hunt them and now they’re invasive.”
“Oh.”
The net’s made to trap birds that top out at around twelve pounds, not a thrashing hog that probably weighs more than I do, so I was hoping it would snap the thing and leave but I’m not that lucky. It’s only succeeded in tangling itself up even more, the net still attached to trees on both sides, and now this is my job.
“Fuck,” I mutter again, and Andi looks over at me, both eyebrows raised. I sigh. “Stay here,” I tell her. “Can you get on top of this boulder?”
