Page 65 of Hearts on the Line

That tracks.

“Okay. I just wanted to see if you’re okay,” and I’m about to turn away when I hear⁠—

“Sloane, is that you?”

I pop my head into her room. Ruth is sitting up in her bed with oxygen tucked neatly under her nose, her short hair standing up as if she’d been electrocuted, her skin pale, bruises on her arms.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

“I bear gifts.” I try to keep my voice light. I make sure I have the newspapers from the surrounding towns tucked under my arm and a smoothie from the coffee shop. It was silly, but I remember my dad always liked smoothies in the hospital.

She eyes me warily. “Come in.”

It feels like I’m walking into a dragon’s lair and not a small corner room with a window facing a hallway. So much for a view.

“You’ve caused quite a hubbub in town.” I sink down into the chair beside the bed.

“What else is new?” She waves for me to give her the newspapers. She quickly scans the front page of one, makes a sound, and tosses it by her feet. “Always did like the word hubbub,” she mumbles. “Good, solid word.”

“Rumor is,” I continue, “there is no paper this week, Ruth, and no mention about why.”

She grips the second paper in her hands and waits a beat before she looks up at me.

“I didn’t get the paper out this week. Missed the deadline.”

“I heard.”

Ruth is never a woman to be pressed for information. She likes to reveal her cards slowly. Maybe we’re similar that way.

This time, she pretends to scan the headlines. I can tell she pretends because she has never read so slowly in her life.

“It was a small stroke,” she says. “And I fell. Hurt my leg and bruised my ribs.”

Ruth lives on the edge of Merritt Point in an enormous farmhouse, alone. It must have been terrifying.

“You didn’t call anyone? No one to fill in?” I scoot forward in the seat, unsure if I should take her hand or play it cool. “You had us worried. You had me worried.”

Ruth, for all her bluster, has tears there in her dark-blue eyes, even though she’d never admit it. She quickly wipes them away, smudging the newspaper ink across her cheeks, and then grumbles more.

“Can never get away from this ink. I swear I’ll be buried and I’ll still smell like it.”

I know she’s trying to cut the tension, but the humor just isn’t hitting right now, all things considered.

“What do you need?”

“What do I need?” she repeats, her voice hoarse. “I need a time machine to make deadline.”

“Unfortunately, I’m a little preoccupied at the moment, and quantum physics has never been a strength of mine.”

“That’s unfortunate. You are very gifted.”

I laugh. The truth is, I haven’t been feeling very gifted in a long time. I think coming back here as the world fell out from underneath my feet has made me realize that I don’t know what I want or where I want to be, or—and this is the most terrifying thing—who I really am.

I left Merritt Point desperate to stop only being Jimmy Arden’s daughter, determined to be, of all things, a war correspondent. I had dreamed up this fantasy that I would be filing stories in busy coffee shops around the world, talking with off-the-record sources like some spy to uncover government fraud or a botched military campaign. I craved the uncertainty of it all, never knowing what was next and exposing the uglier bits of life along with the good.

But it never felt real. I was chasing a version of myself that wasn’t me. None of it ever matched the story I’d told myself. Now I’m settling for a cushy PR job at the end of the summer.

I sigh and look up at Ruth. Her eyes are studying me.