Megs exhaled. “Right.”
Mitch’s eyes drifted shut, but his chest continued to rise and fall.
Debby left the room again.
Megs talked to Mitch, tried to encourage him. “One breath at a time, love.”
Fifteen minutes.
Twenty.
Megs watched the time pass, Rose’s words still in her mind. “I’ll love you no matter what. Do you hear that? Even if you can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t climb, I will love you. You’ve given me the best years of my life. If it were me in that bed and you standing here, you’d say the same thing.”
Twenty-five minutes.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Megs jumped, saw that Mitch was still breathing.
The time had run out.
Debby returned. “I would call that a successful trial. We’ll put him back on his previous settings now so he can rest. This was hard work for him.”
“Thank you so much, Debby.”
“You’re welcome—both of you.” Debby reset the ventilator. “We’ll start doing several of these each day until we’re certain we can extubate him.”
Megs kissed Mitch’s forehead. “I am so proud of you. I always have been. You rest, and I’ll read.”
She and Mitch were about to be reunited in his journal—but it wasn’t going to go the way he had expected.
Mitch arrivedat Camp 4 in his new 1970 VW camper van, expecting to find Megs waiting for him, but her car wasn’t there. Neither was Dean’s.
He parked, grabbed his backpack, and walked over to the dirtbags, who were hanging out at the picnic table.
“Hey, Ahearn!”
“There’s the college grad!”
“Welcome back, man!”
“Hey, Gridwall. Accardo. Cook. Yoder. Ansel.” He lowered his pack onto the bench. “Has anyone seen Megs or Dean?”
Gridwall grinned. “Can’t wait to see her, huh?”
Mitch didn’t see the point in pretending. “You could say that.”
In fact, he was aching to see her again, aching to touch her, to hear her voice, to see her smile, to kiss her.
“I haven’t seen them since I left Tahquitz Rock,” Accardo said.
“She said in her last letter that she’d be here a week ago.”
“Maybe she lost track of time.” Yoder took a hit, passed a joint to Cook.
“Maybe.” Mitch set up his tent in the camping spot he’d shared with her last summer, unable to shake a sense of misgiving.
She ought to be here. She’d said she would get here early so she wouldn’t miss a moment with him. Megs didn’t say things she didn’t mean. It wasn’t like her or Dean not to show up on time.
