“Stay,” he said.
My throat closed. I had a whole speech. I’d practiced it at my campsite that afternoon, sitting on the log, staring at the fire ring, rehearsing sentences I thought I could deliver without falling apart.
Thank you. I’ll remember Wildwood Valley. I’ll remember you. I have to go back to my life.
None of it came out.
“I was coming to say goodbye,” I said.
“I know.”
“I can’t say goodbye.”
He took the bag off my shoulder. He set it on the floor next to the door. He pulled out the stool at the end of the counter—the same stool I’d sat on the first night, the one nearest the wall—and he looked at me.
I sat down.
He looked at me one more beat. Then he turned and walked back to the boards.
The room exhaled. I could feel it—the collective breath of thirty people who’d just watched something they were going to talk about for a while. Frank said something I couldn’t hear. Someone laughed. The yellow rope went back up. Spencer picked his darts off the rail and stepped to the line.
West appeared behind the counter in front of me. He set a blackberry seltzer on a napkin without being asked.
“On the house,” he said.
I wrapped my hands around the can. I didn’t open it yet.
Spencer was at the line. Three darts. Final round. The room settled back into the watching quiet. He brought his arm up. He paused. He released. He didn’t watch it land.
I watched him throw.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. I opened the photo app. The picture was still there—Spencer Kirk at the line, one arm up, three darts, the focus on his face that had stopped me the first night and every night since.
I looked at it for a long time.
I closed the app.
EPILOGUE
JOY: 5 YEARS LATER
“Okay, so full disclosure,” I said to the camera, “I almost turned the car around three times.”
I held the phone steady and let myself laugh. The fire was popping behind me. The overlook stretched out past the edge of the frame, the valley dark below, the ridgeline just barely visible against the last stripe of light on the horizon.
It was a good shot. I knew it was a good shot because I’d been doing this long enough to know without checking.
“Catalina cried when I handed her to Spencer’s mom. Full meltdown. Arms out. Mama, mama, mama. And Madelyn—Madelyn didn’t cry, which was almost worse, because she just looked at me with those big eyes and I thought, okay, I’m a monster, I’m leaving my six-month-old overnight. What kind of mother does this?”
I paused. Let the beat land. I’d learned by now that the pause was where the audience leaned in.
“But here’s what I want to say to you. And I mean this. If you’re a mom and you are watching this from your couch with a baby on your chest and a toddler who’s been screaming since four p.m. and you haven’t been alone with your partner in—I don’t even know—weeks, months—listen to me. Go. Leave the kids with someone you trust and go. Go camping. Go to a hotel. Go sit in a parking lot together and eat drive-through tacos. I don’t care where. Just go.”
I could hear Spencer behind me. Boots on gravel, the soft clink of him setting up the camp stove, the zip of the tent flap. He’d driven us up to the Mountain Road Overlook after dropping the girls at his mom’s place, and he’d set up camp while I finished this video because he knew I needed to wrap it and he’d never once in five years made me feel bad about the phone in my hand.
That was the thing nobody understood about my marriage, and the thing my 1.2 million followers loved most about it. Spencer didn’t compete with the content. He never had. He’d understood from the first night—from the blackberry seltzer and the face-down phone and the fire at Laurel Creek—that the work was real, even when nobody saw it. He just helped me carry it, and I loved him for it.
“Anyway,” I said. “Spencer is finishing camp behind me and I can hear him being very patient about the fact that I’m filming instead of helping, so I’m going to go be a wife now. I’ll post the morning video tomorrow. Love you guys. Go leave your kids with someone. I’m serious.”
