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“God, I’m sorry,” I said, scrubbing my hands across my face.

“You’re not the one who needs to apologize,” he said. “It’s not that I—”

Whatever he was going to say, I never got to hear it. He changed course.

“Mostly sober isn’t good enough for either of us, is what I mean to say. It’s definitely not good enough for you.”

And there it was, the sentence I’d take back to my tent and turn over like a coin. Not you’re safe with me, which is what men say. Not good enough for you. I wondered if this was just what he did to get women’s numbers. But he had an earnestness about him, as if the last thing he wanted was to be complicated.

I was supposed to go to bed then. But despite his best efforts to encourage me to sleep, we talked for another hour, with me drugged to the gills on a six-hundred-year-old love herb and him staring into the fire. We argued, mostly. About whether Eureka’s Old Town was salvageable. He said yes, with money. I said nothing was salvageable with money. Money was how it had become unsalvageable. About the correct response to fog. His answer was to accept it. Mine was to leave the state. His humor took me a second to catch. It was dry and landed out of nowhere.

I kept waiting for the cacao to wear off enough for me to discover that he was actually just ordinary, but that didn’t happen. He stayed distractingly handsome, stubborn, a little too watchful, and maybe a little kinder than he wanted to be caught being. At some point I realized I’d stopped checking myself for chemical interference and I was just enjoying him. The way you enjoy something real.

The cold finally won. He walked me back up the path, keeping two feet of distance the whole way, and stopped short of my tent like there was a line on the ground.

“Drink more water when you wake up,” he said. “It’s worse at dawn.”

“I will,” I said, quietly frustrated with his chivalry. I wondered if he could tell. “I don’t want you to go,” I mumbled, now absolutely furious with myself.

I watched him go still, then, fighting his own restraint, tuck a loose strand of my hair behind my ear. That light, careful brush against my skin sent the current beneath it surging. My chest heaved in an embarrassingly period-drama-esque way.

“I don’t want to go either. But I’m going to.”

“Okay.”

“And Marlowe—”

“Yeah?”

He paused, and then his voice dropped very low. “Don’t come back here. Don’t sign up for the next retreat.”

I stared back at him, and for the first time that night, my mind wasn’t occupied with how hot he was. “Why?”

“I can’t talk about it. And please, don’t say a word about it.”

“Am I—”

“You’re fine, right now. Try to get some sleep.”

I got to the flap and looked back. He was already turning away, and the set of his shoulders held a heaviness I couldn’t read yet, one that had no business belonging to a man who built things and guarded campsites. Later I’d understand I was watching him walk away from the exact thing he’d been sent to walk toward, and that it was the hardest thing he’d done in ten years.

“Hey,” I said. “Thank you.”

He stopped and half-turned.

“Get some rest, Marlowe,” he said. My name sounded intimate from his mouth.

His mouth. That’s one of the many things I thought about as I waited for sleep. When it came, I slept like a stone, and in the morning the hum was gone, boiled off with the fog.

That’s when I wondered why a security guy at a manifestation retreat needed a policy about drugged women, and why he knew my name before I’d said it. And why the hell he’d told me not to come back.

Chapter Five

The headache was hot and pounding. The tent was damp with dew and somewhere outside, a woodpecker worked at a tree at machine-gun speed.

The night came back in fragments. Slow at first, then in a steady drip, but none of it was in sequence or with clean edges. There was a fire, and cacao, and three moons. There was a wish etched in ink and a strange euphoric moment when I’d thought the sea was answering me.

And there was a man. A man called Damian. We’d talked for over an hour. There had been chemistry, but he’d treated it like a rip current, something to respect from the beach but never wade into.