She laughed. “Tempting. But no. I said I’d do this.”
“Committed,” he said, and she heard the smile in his voice. “I respect it. Even if I don’t like picturing you in a thunderstorm by yourself.”
“I’m not alone,” she said, glancing at the sleeping bag cocooned around her. “I’ve got your tent. Your sleeping bag. It’s almost like you’re here.”
“Almostis doing a lot of work there.”
“Let me pretend.”
His breath came slow through the line. “If I were there,” he said quietly, “I’d climb into that sleeping bag with you.”
Warmth curled low in her belly. “I don’t know…It’s a pretty small bag.”
“We’d make it work. I’d slide in beside you, pull you close, keep my arm around you so you’d know I wasn’t going anywhere.”
She swallowed, eyes fixed on the tent wall. “That would help,” she admitted.
There was a pause before he replied, softer this time, “Yeah. Thought so.”
“Good night, Joe.”
“Good night, Krista.”
The line went quiet.
She stared at the darkened screen for a moment before setting the phone beside her and reaching for Isabel’s diary.
The flashlight app on her phone cast a narrow beam of light as she cracked the worn cover and found the photograph of Isabel she’d tucked inside.
“Where did you go?” Krista whispered, wondering why she’d never shared her secrets with her daughter.
Rain hammered the tent, and Krista could picture Isabel in a similar setup. Maybe she’d escaped to the wilderness, camping, using that time to run away from reality and the duties that pressed in on her.
Frogs sang near the lake outside, their croaks strangely clear beneath the storm. She sank deeper into the sleeping bag and began to read, murmuring the Spanish as she translated.
Isabel wrote of the small things. Of them making their special place their own with blankets and cushions, and candles and matches. She talked about the stolen hours by the water. And her sister asking too many questions.
“He saw me before I even understood myself. He saw the truth beneath my hurry. Sometimes I think he knows me better than I know myself. It’s terrifying. And it feels like home…”
Krista’s breath caught at the line aboutthe truth beneath my hurry.
Hurry she understood. Keeping everything running so she never stopped, never thought about what her life had become. The idea of someone seeing past all of that—past the jokes and the busyness and her carefully arranged life—sent a flicker of panic through her.
Someone like Joe, a small part of her whispered.
Thunder rolled again. Her phone screen flickered. Then went black.
“No, no, no.” She tapped it frantically. Her battery icon flashed once in warning and vanished.
The tent plunged into darkness, broken only by the faint, intermittent flash of lightning outside.
“Well,” Krista said into the void, aiming for dry and landing somewhere near shaky, “guess that’s enough soul-searching for one night.”
She closed the journal gently and set it beside her, then curled deeper into Joe’s sleeping bag. The warmth wrapped around her like arms that weren’t there.
Her mind, traitorous, supplied him anyway. Joe sliding into the sleeping bag behind her, close enough that her back fit to his chest like a missing piece.
His hand settling at her waist. His mouth near her ear.
