“You’re not being dramatic,” Joe said quietly.
She almost laughed.
Joe’s hand found hers again without comment. His thumb brushed over her knuckles, slow and steady.
“How long have you been doing all of this?” he asked. “Thedouble duty. Or triple, I guess. Campground, Hideaway, grandparents.”
“Feels like forever,” she said lightly. Then she sighed. “Really? Since before Grandma got sick. They were already slowing down. I stepped in more the last five years. Opening the Hideaway was supposed to bemything. My dream. But I also opened it ten minutes from here for a reason. I keep thinking that if I just work harder, juggle better, it’ll all balance out.”
“You still think that?” he asked.
She thought of the empty sand order, the storm drains, the hospital forms. The sales offer she hadn’t even looked at.
“No,” she said.
They sat with that for a moment.
Fireflies flickered off and on in the trees, tiny floating lights. Somewhere near the south end of the campground, a group of kids burst into laughter, then quieted just as quickly.
“You ever think about not staying?” Joe asked softly. “Before all this. Before the fall.”
“Sometimes,” she admitted. “In that vague, late-night way. I always thought I’d go to Europe after college, maybe with Robyn. Backpacking, or some kind of solo soul-searching trip. See Paris. Get lost in Rome. Take pictures of pastries and pretend I understand wine.”
“Good plan,” he said. “Highly recommend.”
She nudged his knee with hers. “Of course you do. You’ve actually done it.”
“Some of it,” he said. “Not as much as you might think.”
She glanced over. “Thought you’d been all over the world.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve been a lot of places. Not everywhere.”
His fingers tightened slightly around hers.
“My childhood, moving between foster homes, forced me to be at good at packing up, starting over, not getting attached to stuff I’d have to leave. When I found photography, it feltlike the perfect match. Travel. Write, take pictures. In and out. No roots to trip over.
“But after a while,” he went on, “that became its own kind of…empty. You sit in enough hotel rooms and hostels, you start to realize every place looks the same when you never stay long enough to learn which grocery store has the good bread or who makes the best lemon bars in town.”
Her mouth twitched. “Lemon bars are an essential metric, obviously.”
“Obviously,” he said. “I like my work. I love a good story. But I started to realize that what I was jealous of wasn’t other people’s trips.” He nodded toward the campground. “It was their coming home.”
The words hung there, warm and heavy.
Krista’s grip on his hand tightened.
She studied his profile in the soft porch light. The strong line of his nose. The faint stubble he hadn’t bothered to shave yet. The tired around his eyes.
“You spend your whole life learning how to leave,” she said quietly, “and then you have to teach yourself how to stay.”
He glanced at her. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“I don’t know if I ever learned how to leave,” Krista admitted. “I talk about it. Complain. Say I wish things were different. But when push comes to shove, I’m the one who stays. Who picks up the slack. Who keeps this place running. I love my grandparents. I’d do it all again. But sometimes I look at my life and think, when did it stop being mine and become everybody else’s?”
The words felt too honest, too exposed. She almost wished she could yank them back.
“I want both,” she said, barely louder than the creak of the porch boards. “Is that selfish? To want to take care of them and still…have something that’s mine? To travel someday, even. To not always be the one plugging leaks in everything.”
