“Watch them?” Sommer asked. “No. I felt … there was this wall that stopped me. I can’t explain it. But when I met you as Gabriel this morning, I felt an instant trust between us—a sense of being on the same team.” She paused to look at Whiskey. After a moment she turned back. “I’m definitely not finding the words I want to here. Because it’s more than that. It’s bigger. Like—A lot of it is sheer gratitude. But I also have the sense that I’m a piece in someone’s game, and I’m being moved around the board.”
“And the outcome?” Gabriel asked and held his breath because that wasexactlywhat he’d been feeling.
“It’s a matter of rolling the dice.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Sommer
Friday Night.
Hours had passed.
Miles had passed.
Gabriel had talked to her the whole time.
It was the fuel that propelled Sommer up the mountain.
Her body was rubber, and she had to focus on where she placed her boots.
How many times had he caught her and hefted her back to her feet?
How many times had he wrapped her in his arms and said, “Breathe for me. Just stop for a minute and breathe.”
At this stretch the path was too narrow, so he insisted she hold on to the back of his pack.
Their conversation had covered a broad swath of topics, sometimes rich with emotion, deeper than the conversations that she’d had with—well, any of her past intimate partners.
It must be the cathedral of the trees, the confessional of the greens.
“You said you go to therapy?” Sommer asked. “Is this to deal with grief?”
“Life in general. My past job. My present job, which has its own whack to my emotions. My family.”
“Your wife or … or your husband?”
“Hetero through and through. No wife. My past significant other took a job in Indiana. I stayed here for my brother.”
“Will you go join her now?”
“No, that ended. I guess it’s been six or seven months since she left? I think it was a good time for us to part ways, and her taking that job meant we could do it in a way that no one's feelings or egos took a ding.”
“You’re still in touch?”
Whiskey had come back and was lopping by her side, moral support. There was no reason to have her nose to the ground, and she must be exhausted hiking all those miles on her little legs.
“I sent her a text on her birthday,” Gabriel said. “She sent a donation in Daniel’s name when he died, and a card addressed to both Cathy and me.” Gabriel glanced over his shoulder at her. “You?”
“Me what? In therapy?” she asked.
“Involved with someone.”
“I’m living in my little-cottage-in-the-woods phase, my spinster-with-cats phase. Many cats.”
Gabriel whistled. “Whatever he or she did must have been massive.”
“He, singular, recently. They, plural, over the years. I’m hetero through and through.”
