“Yeah, so?” Dylan snorted. “I’ve got a canoe trip planned at the end of the summer, remember?”
“I remember.”
“And you agreed to be part of it.”
“I did. You also made me an offer of hospitality.”
“To come crash at the Adirondack cabin and help me build this birch bark canoe? Absolutely.”
“So the offer is still good?”
“Man, I’ll buy your first beer!” In his enthusiasm, Dylan had a voice as big as the man himself. “I could use some help stretching these bark strips over the frame of the canoe, they’re impossible to get on.”
That was Dylan the historian, all geeky and hand’s-on, building a vessel from scratch. “I appreciate the safe harbor.”
“Safe from what?”
Heartbreak.
“Logan.” Dylan paused. “Are you running away from something again?”
“I didn’t run away from anything.” He frowned at Dylan’s description. “I chose to leave.”
“Right.”
“And it’s not something. It’s someone.”
Dylan made a sucking sound. “That same someone as before?”
“Yeah.”
“Whoa, dude. Whoa.”
Dylan laid his head against the headrest of the driver’s seat, bouncing it off rhythmically as if to knock some sense into himself. “I think she’s the one.”
Dylan dropped something heavy, it sounded like a monster pile of logs. “When did this happen? When I last spoke to you, I thought you were talking about a girl, but I thought that was just a passing thing. That you were content in your manly solitude in the Pacific woods. What the hell happened?”
“My mind is on fire.” Jenny had branded him from the moment he’d laid eyes on her. “Do you remember that kayaking trip we made after we graduated?”
“Hell, yeah. That was one for the history books, but what does that have to do with this?”
“Remember when we hit the fork in the river? How we couldn’t figure out which way to go?”
“You wanted to go right,” Dylan said, “but I insisted we go left. And I nearly got us both drowned in the rapids.”
“Well, that’s where I am right now.”
“Drowning?”
“Staring down two separate paths and putting my future in someone else’s hands.”
“You’re scaring the hell out of me, dude.”
Logan stared through the windshield at the hospital, misgivings curdling in his stomach. “I’m not exactly feeling like Iron Man right now.”
“You know I’ve already had a wife, right?”
“Why do you think I’m calling you?” Logan figured Dylan was the only one who could possibly understand. Dylan had fallen hard and fast, and had good reason to divorce, but Logan hoped Dylan could inject a little sense into this scenario, before Logan played it out to its uncertain end. “The problem is that I’ve only known this woman for two weeks.”
“Holy hell.” The leaf-crunching steps Logan had heard through the phone stopped short. “You fell fast.”
“And hard. I’m about to tell her.”
His stomach clenched. He didn’t know what she was going to say, or how he was going to say it. All he knew was that it needed to be said.
“Call me up when she’s given you an answer, Logan. And don’t go planning a wedding day to interfere with my trip.”
“Is that all the advice you’ve got for me?”
“Answer me one question: Is your heart involved? And I mean your actual heart, dude.”
Logan thought of the intelligent woman with shifting amber eyes who’d cradled the wooden meadowlark in her hands. He thought of the little freckles like constellations across her shoulders. He thought of the hollow that had opened up in his heart when he thought, in the woods, he might lose her forever.
“Yeah,” Dylan breathed into the silence. “I hear you loud and clear, you poor soul.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“Exactly. Take it from a pro. You’re toast.”
“I am in love with her.”
The words rolled off his lips, but the act felt dangerous. He sat in her Saab, which he’d driven here in case she wanted to drive herself away after the conversation with him. It felt dangerous to say those words aloud. They might sink into the leather upholstery and repeat in her ear when she was gone.
Suddenly, all his plans exploded in his head. “Dylan, I don’t know how to do this.”
“You’ll figure it out. No advice I tell you is going to make a damn bit of difference.”
“Really?”
“It’s a mysterious thing, this falling in love. You have to roll with it, even if it rolls you right off a cliff.”
Logan canted forward until the steering wheel dug into his brow.
Dylan sang. “I wish you luck, buddy.”
“I’m going to need it.”
“Uh-huh.” Dylan’s voice held an edge of glee. “And Logan, I can’t wait to meet her.”
Dylan disconnected. Logan slipped the phone back in his pocket, gripping the steering wheel, flexing and flexing until he forced an imprint of the leather into the palms of his hands.
Shoving the door open, he stepped out of the car and braced himself as he approached the entrance to the Spruce Woods Memorial Hospital. The guard at the security desk nodded and waved him to the bank of elevators without checking his ID or signing him in. Too distracted to question the oddity of that lapse, Logan waited by the elevator, half-listening to the conversations around him. He nodded to a resident who greeted him by name as he entered the elevator. He hadn’t had a chance during the emergency to take notice of individual doctors. He’d been so laser-focused on the Jenny on the gurney. Nor had he had the brain-space to do the glad-handling afterwards, as he gripped Jenny’s hand at her bedside, willing her to come out of the ordeal without any lasting complications, grappling with a thorn-infested bramble of feelings. He’d spend the last few days picking through that tangle, and now he’d pushed through with enough clarity to take stock of what had happened, who he was, and what he now had to do.
The wild card in all his plans was Jenny.
***
With her back to the door, Jenny stared blindly through the
