Then she went down the steps and got in the truck.
I locked the cabin, put the key back under the third step, and stood on the porch for a moment and looked at the valley. Four years I’d been coming here alone, to have a place where the only voice was mine and the weather’s. It had been exactly what I needed and now it had something else in it, something that was going to be there every time I came back, in the blanket on the shelf and the fortune slip that wasn’t on the nightstand anymore.
I found I didn’t mind that at all.
I got in the truck.
London had her feet up on the dashboard already—one foot, then the other, the ease of someone who’d stopped testing and started belonging. She looked at me when I got in and said nothing, the corner of her mouth moving, and I backed us down the gravel road and out through the lodgepoles and onto the two-lane heading south.
The mountains held in the rearview as we descended. She watched them until the treeline closed.
“You know what I’m going to think about?” she said, after a while.
“What?”
“The hot dog.” She was looking out the window, the flannel soft around her shoulders, her hair loose in the morning light. “Three months from now, in Philadelphia, I’m going to walk past some unremarkable gas station and I’m going to think about that hot dog at two in the morning and how it was actually fine and I didn’t say so.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Because it was funnier not to.” She turned her head to look at me. “And because I think I needed you to believe I was more high-maintenance than I actually am.”
“You’re exactly as high-maintenance as you actually are,” I said. “Which turns out to be considerably less than advertised.”
She laughed at that—all the way through, filling the cab.
The truck rolled south. The road opened up ahead of us, long and straight through the basin, the high desert coming back in on either side as we dropped out of the mountains. I had the window down a few inches and the cold mountain air was running through it and she had her feet on the dashboard and neither of us was trying to solve anything.
“Tell me about Montana winters,” she said.
“I told you about Montana winters.”
“Tell me again.” She settled back against the seat. “I want to hear it on the way home.”
Home. She’d said it without thinking about it and I didn’t point it out. I let it sit in the cab between us, doing what it was doing.
I told her about the winters.
The road ran south toward everything that came next, and somewhere in the last four days, without either of us planning it, it had started to feel like the right direction.
Epilogue
LONDON
PHILADELPHIA IN OCTOBERdid not mess around.
I had been warned. Multiple times, by multiple people — Bree, who had forwarded me a color-coded seasonal weather breakdown before I'd even signed my lease, and Rafe, who had said simply, "Pack layers," in the tone of a man who had opinions about what happened to people who didn't. I had nodded and purchased a camel wrap coat in the softest wool I'd ever touched, three crewnecks in rust, deep teal, and warm ivory, and a pair of slate-blue cashmere joggers that felt like being held by something that had no agenda about it. When I'd sent Sebastian a picture of the ivory one, he had written back: finally, a color that loves you back. He still hadn't forgiven me for the box dye. I had stopped expecting him to. Sebastian's forgiveness operated on a timeline measured in seasons, not weeks, and I had used up whatever goodwill reserve existed by going brunette in a thrift store in East LA with a four-dollar kit and no consultation. The highlights he had toned individually. The grief was proportional.
I wore the cashmere joggers to my Tuesday seminar anyway. With the rust crewneck. With flat ankle boots in a dark cognac that I had found on my own, in an actual store in Rittenhouse Square, without Monique, without a pull list, without anyonetelling me what the look was supposed to say. What it said, as far as I could tell, was that I was warm and I had somewhere to be.
This was new. Not the having-somewhere-to-be part — I had always had somewhere to be, the calendar had always been full, Bree had always been three steps ahead of me with the color-coded structure I'd stopped questioning because it worked. What was new was walking across campus in the cold with my hair down and nothing in it except the good conditioner I'd found by accident in a drugstore two blocks from our apartment. The particular amber it had settled into since Idaho caught the light in a way that had nothing to do with a toning brush and everything to do with what it actually was. I had walked past three mirrors on the way out of the building one morning last week and not adjusted anything, which was either personal growth or I was running late. Possibly both.
Rafe had looked at my hair one morning about three weeks in — I'd been standing at the kitchen window with my coffee, the early light coming in flat and pale off the rooftops — and said, "Perfect Amber."
"That's not a color," I said.
"It is now."
"You named my hair."
