Is Jensen another version of this same sad song? An anchor I’m gripping with both hands because the alternative is floating alone in open water to find out whether I can actually swim.
The thought makes my head pound so hard I have to close my eyes against it.
Jensen doesn’t weigh me down. He makes me feel like the woman I became on the trail with him might exist outside her bubble of borrowed courage and fictional words.
But I felt that way about Kristen, too, and look how that turned out. What happens when the man who already lost one woman to cancer realizes he doesn’t want to take that chance again?
The passenger door opens, and as if I summoned him to me, Jensen folds himself into the passenger seat, leaving the door ajar. He doesn’t say anything, just settles in, like hanging out in a parked car in a driveway is a perfectly normal activity.
“What are you doing?” I ask without lifting my head from the steering wheel.
“I definitely haven’t been glancing out the front window every ten minutes like a dad waiting for his kid to come home safe from prom.” He stretches his legs as far as the compact SUV will allow, which isn’t far. “Turns out Cody’s right about the grumpy old man thing.”
A laugh bubbles up from my throat, which is a miracle given how I feel. “You’re distinguished.”
“I’ll accept that, but only from you.”
I can feel his eyes on me even with my face still angled toward my lap. “How’d it go?” he asks.
He has to know based on…well…me, but I appreciate the question.
“She was fine,” I say, sitting back against the seat but not meeting his gaze. “She just didn’t care. Not about me specifically—not about any of it. Writing the book was a job, and her bravery was the story that sold it. She faced her fears and then went home as the same scared person she’d always been.” I sound bitter and don’t know how to stem the tide of devastation rolling through me. “She told me she doesn’t want to be anyone’s hero.”
Jensen doesn’t rush to fill the ensuing silence or offer platitudes before I’m finished falling apart, and I love that about him. Add it to the damn list.
“I feel so stupid.” A tear slips down my cheek, and I swipe at it with the back of my hand. “I spent over a year idolizing this woman, then hiked four days through the mountains and drove fifteen hours in my quest to prove I was worthy of what her words meant to me. And she’s just an author who wrote a book because the concept was marketable, so a publisher gave her a lot of money.” Another tear, and this one I let fall. Fighting it is taking energy I don’t have. “I made her into this shining answer to questions I should’ve been figuring out for myself.”
“Sloane.” He reaches across the console and wraps his big hand around both of mine.
“Don’t be nice to me right now. I’ll totally lose it.”
“That’s okay with me.” His thumb traces a slow circle on my knuckle, and I press my lips together hard to stem more tears. “A book inspired you to be brave, and you did something most people wouldn’t dream of. Multiple things. You started a book club and pushed your friends to face their fears. They did that because you believed in them first.”
“That’s not?—”
“You fought cancer, and you’re winning. Every day, you’re winning. So how come you’re sitting here feeling like you failed because a stranger didn’t live up to the person you imagined?” He shakes his head. “You don’t need her. You never did. Everything you thought she gave you was already yours.”
I feel my chin tremble and bite down on my lower lip hard enough to feel the sting.
“I should have just watchedThe Wizard of Oz,” I mutter. “It would have been easier.”
“You don’t want easy.”
His tone is rougher than usual, and I look at him fully for the first time since he got in the car. The afternoon light catches the silver threaded through the dark hair at his temples, sharpening the hard lines of his face, while his storm-gray eyes pin me in place with an intensity that steals my breath. “You climbed into the wilderness alone, carrying enough fear to crush most people, and you kept going anyway. You don’t take the safe route through life, Sloane. You meet it head-on.” He shakes his head slightly. “You’re the most inspiring person I’ve ever met. And not because you beat a disease or hiked a mountain. It’s because you keep showing up with your whole heart, even after life gives you reasons not to.”
The tears are falling freely now, and I don’t bother wiping them away.
“You don’t need a lighthouse,” he says quietly. “You’re the brightest thing I can imagine.”
I can’t speak, so I sit in the rental car, holding the hand of a man who somehow sees me more clearly than I’ve ever seen myself.
A minute passes, maybe two. I take a shaky breath and wipe my face, then let out an exhale that carries the bulk of the weight I’ve been holding since I walked out of that bungalow.
“So what do I do now that I’m my own lighthouse?” I ask, scrunching up my nose.
Jensen leans back in the passenger seat, his eyes lit with emotion I’m not brave enough to name yet.
“How about we go dancing?”
