A trout swims past, oblivious to everything but the current carrying him toward his next meal.
That’s how I need to be now, I decide:Just be a trout, Thorn, I tellmyself. I need to focus on the mission, the hike, our next meal, our next stop—how to get the group from here to there. Not what Matteo did, or didn’t do, in the past. That’s irrelevant to the mission.
“Okay, so for today,” I say, putting on a voice that’s all business, “you can take the lead again. We need to cover a lot of ground in order to get to the lake by tomorrow night, so I’ll need your help to keep us moving while I make sure the back of the group keeps up at a decent pace, and—”
“Thorn,” he interrupts, the exhausted edge to his voice so sharp it cuts me right off. “Just say what you really want to say, man.”
It’s so unlike him—so direct, so assertive, sounchill—that every thought about the trek flies right out of my head.
Just say what you really want to say, man.
I’m not sure he’s ready for what I really want to say.
Everything I can think of feels like it would just be salt in old wounds—and not just his. Salt inmywounds, too.
“Look, if you’re still hung up on Blair, I get it. She’s incredible. I tried not to fall in love with her, I really did.”
My mouth goes dry. Where to even begin with all of that?
“It’s not about Blair,” I say evenly. “Blair can make her own choices, and clearly I’m not what she wanted.”
It’s actually more freeing to say this out loud than I expected: it doesn’t feel like saltina wound so much as salt on an old scar. I think there was some part of me, deep down, that feared itwasBlair I was still hung up on.
“And honestly,” I go on, “it didn’t completely surprise me when Blair left.”
Blair reminded me of a bird from the moment I met her, too much energy to stay in one place for long. I think I always knew she’d take off with some other guy one day, but I talked myself into thinking maybe I was the one who’d be worth staying for.
I take a deep breath. He told me to say what I really wanted to say, and this is it.
“But you—yousurprised me. It wasn’t just some other guy she left with. You were my best friend, Matty. You were supposed to be here to help me get through our eventual breakup, not be the reason it happened.”
Matteo’s face goes completely blank.
I was right. He wasn’t ready.
And truthfully, neither was I. This feels like an entirevatof salt in a very raw wound.
“Are you still with her, at least?” I ask after a long minute.
He clearly regrets bringing it up. I bet he wishes he’d just let me keep talking about our itinerary for the next two days.
Finally, he clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says, picking at a thumbnail, not meeting my eye. “I moved back to get a place for us to settle down.”
The idea of Blair settling down anywhere just doesn’t sit as it should—what I said was true, I never could imagine her staying with me forever, and I still can’t imagine her staying with anyone else. Not even Matteo.
But I’m not about to say so.
“I didn’t even know you were back until Danica told me,” I say instead.
There was a time when we saw each other daily, when we knew each other’s plans as well as we knew our own. He was my closest friend.
“Yeah, I realized last week that I was just kinda done with Peru,” he replies. “We both were, but she stayed a bit longer to help with one more hike—they’re sort of scrambling to fill our spots. I flew home over the weekend and reached out to Danica as soon as I got back since our savings won’t carry us for long. I forgot how expensive shit is here.”
Again: Where to even start? Am I hearing this correctly—that they just decided on a whim,last week, to ditch their jobs and move back to California together without doing any real prep work to secure jobs or housing or—
I can’t think about it too much. It’s a headache waiting to happen.
Was Matteo always this flighty, or has Blair just rubbed off on him? His sudden move to Peru was a blindside when it happened and seemed totally out of character.
