“Better late than never,” Aiden announced, grinning at my mom.
She looked right through him.
Behind her stood Hallie, Damien, my dad…
And Mandi.
I wasn’t even surprised. I’dexpectedthis.
The schedule only told us where to meet, without any hint of what we were out here doing.
The walking trails provided a clue, though.
“I thought we should all have a little fun,” Mom chirped, grabbing a small stack of folders from the picnic table we were all gathered around. “There’s a great little company here that sets up games for groups out in the forest.”
My stomach sank.
“So they’ve set us up a little scavenger hunt!” she enthused. “We’re all going to split into teams and find everything on our lists. Isn’t that fun?”
It was not fun. My idea offunwas sitting in front of the fire with my boots drying by the door, sipping a finger of scotch, catching up on some reading. Maybe an audiobook, with Aiden.
This? This was torture. This was the kind of torture out-of-touch managers inflicted on their staff as a team-building exercise, which I was pretty sure this was intended to be.
But it probably wasn’t specifically intended to torture me. To my sister, thiswasfun.
And it was her wedding, and I’d deal with it.
Maybe I could convince Aiden to sneak back to the car with me once everyone else was out of sight.
Although, maybe not.Hewas grinning from ear to ear, like this was actually the most fun he could imagine having.
Right. Kieran had always been outdoorsy, too, and Devin clearly was. It made sense that Aiden would havesomeof that.
Sometimes I’d felt like I was the only person in Slow Falls whodidn’tlove going on long walks in the woods. I’d only seen the actual falls once in my life up close, on a school trip.
Kieran had told me once that he made out with Louise Sanders under them during homecoming week. I was probably supposed to think that sounded romantic or exciting, but it mostly sounded wet.
“Your folders will tell you who you’re teaming up with,” Mom said, passing a folder to Mandi, then me, then Hallie and Damien, then Dad and Aiden.
I opened the folder to find a bright yellow band at the top of all my information sheets.
Aiden’s band was pink.
My stomach sank.
Mandi caught my eye, waving her yellow-banded team sheet over at me.
I got the feeling the deck had been very carefully stacked to make sure this was how things would go down.
“I’ll be running things from here,” Mom explained. “Once you’ve found everything on your list, you make your way back. First team back gets a romantic dinner for two tonight.”
Of course they did.
Mom hadn’t beenplanningto run things, she hadn’t accounted for Aiden at all. She’d planned for me to wander off into the woods with Mandi and hopefully come out eager to give things another shot.
Which only showed how little she knew about me. If she’d known me,reallyknown me at all, she would have known that I was more likely to get eaten by a moose than get back together with my ex in the woods.
Were there moose this far south? Probably. I had no idea what the migratory habits of moose were. All I knew was that they were as big as a car and no mammal needed to be that huge.
