"You'll like this situation."
She narrows the field question by question for most of an hour, and when the first Catskills marker sails past she smacks the dash in triumph.
"The Catskills! You're taking me up a mountain?"
"A modest one. There's a spot I've been saving." And that's true in a way I don't examine too closely, because I've camped on five continents and never once brought another person to thisone. "You'll see it tomorrow in daylight. That's the whole reveal. Don't ask me the elevation, you'll just use it against me."
"I would never." She absolutely would. She settles back, victorious, and twenty minutes later her boots are off and her socked feet are up on my dash, which in the Ferrari would be grounds for ejection if she were anyone else, but in this Jeep her comfort looks like the entire point of the vehicle.
I keep my eyes on the road and mostly succeed. But the setting sun's coming through her window and lighting her profile gold, and the sleeping bags in the back are zipped into one wide double, a decision I made this morning with a completely straight face, and my mind keeps drifting to tonight: a tent, a lantern, this woman, and no town for forty miles. Last night I learned what she looks like falling apart in candlelight. Tonight I get to find out what she sounds like when the only other thing making noise is the nature that surrounds us.
The light goes long and gold. The road empties out. She DJs badly and with total confidence, steals sips of my gas-station coffee, and tells me about her juniors performing the Macbeth murder scene with sound effects.
"Owen did the knocking at the gate on his desk. Full commitment. And then Lisa, my quiet one, my sure-thing-valedictorian, does the scream." She demonstrates a modest classroom scream, in the car, with total sincerity, and I nearly take out a mile marker. "The vice principal came to my door, Finn. I had to explain Shakespeare to administration through the window like a hostage."
I'm laughing at highway speed, the real kind that starts in the chest, and she looks pleased with herself the way she does when a lesson lands. Somewhere past the last of the bridge traffic she goes quiet, watching the hills come up in the windshield with her hand resting on my forearm like it lives there.
I've made this drive before. Versions of it, anyway, on better roads and worse ones, in machines that cost more than houses, toward peaks with real elevation and my name on somebody's manifest. Every single time, the best part was the leaving. Watching whatever town it was get small behind me, feeling the tether snap, the old escape-velocity high.
Mattichogue is an hour behind us and shrinking, and I keep checking the rearview, waiting for the high.
It doesn't come. What comes instead is quieter and bigger and sits in my chest like ballast, steadying everything. For the first time in my life, leaving doesn't feel like getting away. It feels like heading toward something.
Her thumb moves on my forearm. The hills open up.
I put my foot down and drive toward it.
CHAPTER 26
DARCY
We rolled into a little campground near the trailhead after ten last night, and Finn raised a tent in the dark in roughly the time it takes me to find my keys. Whatever romantic Friday night plans anyone might have imagined, the week we'd both put in outvoted them. He zipped us into a sleeping bag built for two, gathered me in against his chest, and I was asleep before I finished deciding to be. I slept like I was on summer break.
A few things were learned overnight. Item one: A sleeping pad is nothing but a rumor of a mattress, and my hips woke up with strong objections. Item two, and more urgent: I unzipped the tent flap at dawn and found Finn crouched at a camp stove in the gray-gold light, hair tousled, entirely at home, making coffee, and I feel obliged to state that watching him do this is a problem. I've met Showman Finn, Competent Finn, and Sex God Finn who takes his time and knows exactly how to please my body. Nobody briefed me on Trail Finn.
Trail Finn wears low-slung faded jeans and a black T-shirt that clings to his muscled shoulders and torso. He carries a pack the size of a mini fridge like it's a lunch box, and reads the woodsthe way I read a room of juniors: constantly, without appearing to.
His forearms alone are doing things that would get a book banned in three counties.
My phone, checked only once since we left, offered a single bar and then thought better of it. No signal. No school. No town. Just us.
"Feedback," I say, accepting a tin cup of coffee that tastes better than anything my kitchen has ever produced.
"Already?"
"The sleeping pad is a crime against humanity."
"The pad is a luxury item." He doesn't even look up from the stove. "You should see what I usually sleep on when I'm camping."
"A bed of pine needles and a rock for a pillow?"
"Moss, if I'm lucky." He hands me a plate of eggs that has no business being that good at this altitude, sits down beside me on the log with his own breakfast, and knocks his knee against mine. "Today you see it. Four miles in. We take it slow."
I groan and dig into my breakfast, even though deep down I'm excited to see what he has in store for us.
We finish eating, pack up our gear and extinguish our fire, then the rest of the adventure begins. I am determined to be good at this, or, failing that, to look plausible doing it. Finn adjusts my pack straps from behind before we start, hands warm through the fabric, so it stops pulling at my shoulders and starts riding my hips, and doesn't make a lesson out of it.
On the trail, he hands me water before I know I want it. He matches my pace so naturally that it takes me two miles to notice he has never once been ahead of me, and when the trail turns into rock steps he's just there, hand out, like punctuation. No quiz. No performance. He hands me the mountain one piece at a time as if it obviously belongs to both of us.
