Chase noticed she and Lily earned a hard stare from Sarah when they walked into the dining room together, and she pretended to ignore her sister’s scrutiny on her way through the breakfast line. Usually she laughed off Sarah’s not-too-subtle commentary about her less-than-serious approach to relationships, but this time a surge of protectiveness mixed with annoyance had her directing Lily to a table by the windows out of Sarah’s sight line.
“Okay over here?” Chase asked.
“It’s great.” Lily off-loaded her plate of eggs and waffles and cup of coffee onto the table and sank down with a sigh. “Every time I look out the window, I’m a little astonished to realize I’m here.”
“Miss the city?”
“Not yet.” Lily smiled. “Other than the shopping, of course.”
Chase winced. “Sorry about the change of plans—I promise we’ll get into town as soon as there’s a free couple of hours.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. I know—at least I’m coming to understand—what a demanding job you have. Trust me, I get not being able to make plans with any certainty.”
“Thanks,” Chase said as she took her first blessed sip of decent coffee in two days. “But I really do want to make it into town with you. And I don’t make a habit of standing women up.”
Lily regarded her over the top of the coffee cup she held in both hands as if it was a precious object. “I wasn’t thinking of a trip to buy boots as a date.”
Chase laughed. “How about if I add lunch—or dinner. Or, hell, breakfast?”
“How about we decide what to call it if we actually ever manage to get out of here.”
“I plan to make that a priority,” Chase said steadily. “I’ve been looking forward to it.”
Lily blushed. “So have I, but we both have work first.”
“So, how are you liking things so far?”
“The medical work is pretty straightforward,” Lily said pensively. “It’s a lot like family practice. Nothing urgent most of the time, just the usual common problems in a place like this. Rashes and bug bites and sprains, the things active kids always run into. Not that I’m complaining—I’m perfectly happy not dealing with much in the way of serious problems.”
“Big change from what you’re used to,” Chase said.
Lily nodded. “Even before the last couple of years, big-city ERs were pretty much trauma units twenty-four seven, even when the cases weren’t actually traumas. Patients presented with more and more serious problems, mostly because there were fewer and fewer primary care physicians to see them, and the health care system forced them to do less and less. The ER has become the only source of care for many people, so it was pretty much nonstop.” She shook her head. “And then the pandemic hit and everything came to a screeching halt. The work turned into something…unrecognizable.”
“And all of you in the city were really the first in the US to get hit in a big way.”
“Yes. We had no idea what was happening at first—a trickle of cases turned into an avalanche practically overnight.”
That haunted look appeared in Lily’s eyes, and Chase reached for her hand. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”
Looking surprised at the contact, Lily nevertheless turned her hand over until her fingers brushed Chase’s palm. The sensation shot through Chase like lightning, leaving her just a little breathless. She sat very still to avoid breaking the tenuous connection.
“No, you shouldn’t be. It’s just there isn’t very much to say. None of us had ever experienced anything like it before, had no idea from one day to the next how bad it would get or when it would stop, and there was just this constant…lack. Lack of everything. Knowledge of what to do, understanding of the disease…” She gave a bitter laugh. “Believe me, there’s nothing much worse for a physician than not understanding what they’re up against. Except failure.” She looked away. “And there was a lot of that.”
“I’m sorry,” Chase said, “that you went through it, and that I brought it up today.”
“It’s part of us all, now, isn’t it?” Lily said. “But we’re here, and we’re moving on. Even if it takes longer for some of us.” She moved her hand from Chase’s, but her smile was bright and her eyes clear again. “Besides, I’d rather hear about what you’ll be doing in the next few days.”
“I’ve got a list of messages that will take me an hour to get through, the session with the campers to go over what they’ll need for their first wilderness outing tomorrow, and then seeing to any callouts along with my routine patrol.”
Lily sat back with a head shake. “I’m not hearing the part where you get some sleep.”
Chase grinned. “I’m an expert napper.”
“In your Jeep?”
“Sometimes. Mostly, though—”
“A blanket on the ground,” Lily finished.
“You remembered.” Chase registered the odd pleasure over such a small thing that somehow didn’t feel so small.
“I won’t criticize, as I’ve been there myself plenty,” Lily said. “Tell me what’s in store for the kids on this wilderness thing.”
“You mean when I take them out into the woods and plop them down somewhere and tell them I’ll be back for them tomorrow?”
“You’re kidding about that, right?”
“I’m actually kidding about it today, but we are going to do that at some point. It’s called wilderness survival training for a reason, and this camp is designed to impart serious outdoor skills. That’s really clear in all the info provided before campers apply. So it’s part of the experience. It’s why they come here and not somewhere else. We actually teach advanced wilderness skills.”
“You’re really going to leave them out there somewhere?”
“Eventually. Of course, we’re not gonna go very far away. The only real danger is if someone decides to cut out and head back on their own or the occasional predator wanders too close to camp.”
“Occasional and predator do not seem compatible.”
Chase laughed.
Lily shook her head. “I have to say that some of these kids do not look to me like they want to be left out in the woods overnight.”
“True,” Chase said. “There are always a couple who never really absorb the message or who end up here for the summer because their parents think it will be good for them or they just wanted a supervised environment for them for the summer. Those kids tend to resent any part of what we do here.”
“Recipe for revolt,” Lily observed.
“Totally agree. Those are the kids who are probably here under moderate duress.”
Lily quirked a brow. “Are you talking about anyone in particular?”
Chase glanced around to be sure no one was close enough to overhear. “Julia Latoya pretty much confirmed that Giovanna Langford is here because her parents didn’t like her choice of friends and wanted to make sure she was tucked away somewhere remote and secure until they could ship her off to college.”
“I know her father’s a state senator,” Lily said, “and I gather he’s a pretty extreme conservative.”
Chase smiled. “That’s summing it up a little too nicely. He’s anti just about everything that isn’t white, Christian, heterosexual. I suppose if he didn’t have a wife and a daughter, he’d be more vocally anti-woman too.”
“Can’t be fun growing up in that household, especially if there’s security around all the time.”
“No, I’m sure it isn’t.” Chase finished off the last of her food and slid the plate away. “And I feel sorry for the kid that she’s here when she doesn’t want to be, but there are worse places she could be. Worse things that she could be experiencing.”
“Do you know anything about the nature of her parents’ concerns?” Lily paused. “It’s not just idle curiosity. If she’s into drugs or something potentially self-destructive, I ought to know, so I can keep an eye out. We might have a zero-tolerance policy for drugs and alcohol here, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for the campers to have access. They’re not prisoners, and I suppose they’re going to have a chance to go into town.”
“Oh yeah,” Chase said. “There’s an outing planned every week for shopping, sightseeing, that kind of thing. And there’s the big Fourth of July celebration with a night tour of the lake on one of the historic paddleboats. We have the whole thing to ourselves.”
“That sounds like fun.”
“It is, actually. It’s beautiful, and you can see the fireworks really well from the lake.”
Lily said, “I haven’t seen fireworks in years.”
“It is one of those things that never gets old.” Chase smiled.
“Simple pleasures?” Lily said.
“Sometimes they’re the best.” Chase paused. “Like stargazing.” She couldn’t quite keep the desire that surged with the memory from showing in her voice.
“I haven’t forgotten,” Lily murmured.
“Neither have I.” Chase almost confessed she’d spent a lot of time reliving various moments of that moonlight walk—especially the kiss—and wondering when and how she’d manage another, but she didn’t want it to come off as a line. Lily deserved more than that.
“So,” Lily said in a tone that signaled she was intentionally changing the subject, “what do you do when you’re not patrolling, out there in the wilderness by yourself?”
“Work out, read, do a little gardening during the summer.”
Lily laughed, her eyes sparkling. “You garden?”
Chase drew herself up and feigned affront. “I’ll have you know I not only garden, I cook.”
Lily stared. “You cook.”
“I do,” Chase said just a tad smugly. “I grow lots of vegetables, obviously, because they’re great fresh and a lot of them keep well in a root cellar. I’ve got some raspberry bushes, and blueberries grow wild everywhere up here. Stock up on dry goods—beans and pasta—and you’ve got a good assortment for most meals.”
“Pleasure or necessity?”
“Both. I live where I work, we all do—it’s a job requirement. So a forty-minute drive from anywhere that offers takeout, and I can’t really afford to be in the middle of dinner in Lake George when I need to be fifty miles in the other direction, chasing a bear away from somebody’s campsite.”
“Is it where you grew up—where you live now?” Lily asked.
“My parents’ land, yes. The homestead is Sarah’s—she gets up there a few times a year. I built a cabin not far from there a few years back.”
“You built…as in had it built, or…”
“I built it. Log and stone.”
“I’m impressed.”
Chase shrugged. “I had some time on my hands, and I needed something to keep me in shape. Sarah helped.”
“So you built your own home, grow your own food, and what else? Do you hunt?”
“No. My parents were naturalists, and every form of life, animal or plant, was a miracle to them. I don’t kill animals for food, but I also understand that the world is populated by people who eat animals, and others raise animals for food, and their livelihoods depend on it. So if I want to eat meat, I buy it. I do like to fish, and I catch and release almost everything. But during the season when the lakes and streams are stocked, if we don’t fish them down a little bit, they’ll be overpopulated. So now and then, I’ll take a bass or trout if I get one and cook it up.”
“That’s fascinating.”
“You don’t cook?”
Lily smiled. “Does heating up leftover pizza count?”
“Not even close. But I do make a mean pizza.”
“When do you have time?”
Chase lifted a shoulder. “This time of year I don’t have much, but I don’t have a wide variety of interests. What interests me”—she glanced toward the windows and, beyond that, the mountains—“is out there. There’s always something to see, something to discover.”
“I can imagine. Do you get much chance to climb?”
Chase jerked back. “No.”
“Oh,” Lily said, reaching for the dish of raspberry jam for her last piece of toast. “I’m surprised, it seems like a natural—”
“I don’t climb anymore,” Chase said flatly.
Lily looked up. “I’m sorry. Not my business.”
Chase let out a breath. Not the direction she expected the conversation to go. From easy and casual to raw and too damn close. Not Lily’s fault. “I used to. Then I fell.”
Lily had heard every tragic story of loss imaginable, but she never grew immune to it, and this time the barely concealed pain in Chase’s eyes struck her hard. “Then I’m sorry for mentioning it.”
Chase grimaced. “It’s the morning for treading on tender spots, isn’t it.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” Lily put down her knife and took Chase’s hand the way Chase had taken hers. “I want to get to know you, the parts you want to show me, but we all have our secrets and places we’d rather not go. The last thing I would want is to bring up past pain.”
“It was seven years ago—I’m…I was a free-climber. That’s—”
“I know what it is—no ropes or safety lines, right?”
“Yes. I started when I was a kid, and by the time I was eighteen I was a ranked competitive climber. I planned to climb a few more years and then open a climbing school.” Chase’s voice turned to gravel and misery darkened her eyes. “I missed a handhold—a simple thing I’d done ten thousand times. I fell, broke my back, and my climbing days were done. I ought to be over it by now.”
“Why?”
“I’m lucky,” Chase said, her grip on Lily’s hand tightening. “I healed, I can do what I need to do for my job—I just can’t climb anymore. Not the way that counts for me.”
“I don’t know if there’s any time limit on grief. Or anger.”
Chase stared. “It’s the anger I mostly feel now. How did you know?”
“You lost something important to you—I don’t need to hear the story to know that. I can hear the mountains in you when you talk. I sensed them in you when…”
“When, Lily?” Chase murmured, her fingers closing around Lily’s. “When?”
“When we walked by the lake,” Lily whispered, her gaze searching the depths of Chase’s eyes, the deep blue of the sky. The dark clouds of old pain had passed, for now, and a weight lifted from Lily’s heart. “When I watched you swimming at dawn.” She took a deep breath. Too much had been said already to pretend nothing had passed between them. “When we kissed.”
“See?” Chase rubbed her thumb over Lily’s palm. “Told you I was lucky.”
Lily smiled around the sadness for Chase’s loss. “I—”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Sarah stated in a tone that suggested she wasn’t sorry at all, “but Nat’s on the radio looking for you. Says they need you up at Crandall’s trailhead—some dogs have treed a bear, and Fish and Wildlife are requesting an assist.”
Chase frowned and pulled her phone from her pants pocket. “Hell, it’s dead. Never got a chance to charge it.” She rose and glanced at Lily. “Sorry.”
“Of course, go,” Lily said.
Chase hurried away, and Sarah said, “When did you run into her? I didn’t know she was back.”
Lily reached for her coffee. “She was coming back from a swim.” Technically true. “I was up early—it’s so quiet here at night, I can’t sleep.”
Sarah frowned. “I told Nat she’d just gotten back, but that’s what it’s like this time of year.”
Lily had an anxious moment, thinking about the physical toll of Chase’s job after what Chase had told her about her injury, and then just as quickly reminded herself that Chase was fit and healthy or she wouldn’t have gotten the job in the first place.
“She loves it,” she said quietly.
“She tell you that?” Sarah asked, an odd curious note in her voice.
Lily rose and smiled, thinking about moonlight walks and kisses. “She didn’t have to.”