My boots hold. Somewhere early on I send a silent thank you to the version of me who broke them in a couple years ago and then abandoned the project. It turns out she was training for this all along.
I spend one entire quarter mile in serious contemplation of Finn's hands on a rock ledge, and where else those hands have recently been—and where, God willing, they will be again by nightfall. The mountain air is supposed to clear a person's head. My brain has other priorities.
At the stream crossing he goes first, turns on the far rock, and takes my hand for the last three stones, and then doesn't give it back for a while. I don't ask for it back, either.
And then, somewhere past the crossing, the brush to my right explodes.
I levitate. There is no verb for what I do that preserves my dignity, so I'll be accurate instead. I levitate sideways, with a sound I will deny until death, colliding directly into Finn. He catches all of me, one arm under my thighs, one across my back, as if women fling themselves at him on switchbacks daily and he has never once dropped one.
The murderer in the brush reveals itself.
It is a chipmunk.
It is the size of a dinner roll. It regards us both with open contempt and returns to its errands.
Finn laughs. He tries not to for approximately one second, and then he laughs from the chest. He has to put me down he's chuckling so hard, though I notice his hands take their time about releasing me.
"Not one word of this to anyone," I tell him, sternly, in my best serious teacher tone of voice.
"Wouldn't dream of it." His face is a parade of amusement.
"That rodent seemed a lot bigger before it came out of the bush."
"Enormous," he agrees solemnly. "Easily half a pound. You did the right thing screaming like it was a bear."
I stalk up the trail more determined than ever, with my chin high and his laugh warm on my back. When I take the next rock steps without his hand just to prove a point, he has the grace to let me.
An hour later the trail bends, the trees open, and there it is.
A ledge clearing, small and level and impossibly green, with the whole valley falling away blue beyond it. Ridge after ridge going soft in the distance, and somewhere below us a stream is making music against the tranquility of it all.
It's not grand. It's not a postcard. It's better.
It's a secret. A room with one wall missing and the world for a view.
"I found it the summer I was seventeen," Finn says. He's watching me see it, with an expression that makes me think watching me is his favorite thing to do. "I never brought anybody here until now."
I look at this man, who got bullied by his own brain in every classroom in Mattichogue and answered it by making the entire outdoors his library, and who is now standing in the middle of his oldest secret watching me like my opinion is the only review that counts.
"It's perfect," I say, because it is, and because the other things lining up behind my teeth aren't ready yet.
We eat lunch on the ledge, the valley doing its long blue thing below us, and I ask the question the place keeps asking for me.
"What did seventeen-year-old Finn do up here?"
He chews, considering. "Sat, mostly. Planned." He tips his chin at a flat rock near the edge. "The first Bardot Adventures logo got drawn right there, on the back of a chemistry quiz I'd failed. Mostly I sat up here and planned my escape." A beat, his eyes on the ridges. "Thorough work. Look how far I got."
He says it wryly, but I hear all the layers, and I put my hand on his knee and leave it there. We sit with the valley for a while, not fixing anything, because some things aren't broken anymore, just true.
Then, while he sorts gear, I make my announcement.
"I'm putting up the tent."
He pauses a beat before responding. "Okay."
"Alone."
"Now, look who's getting into roughing it," he says, then holds up his hands in surrender and finds himself a big boulder with a view.
