Nick gives me a glinting grin, the way he hasn’t in a long time. “Yes, but you never know what could happen.”
That much is certainly true, I think as I stare out the window. I want to be buoyed by optimism, the way Nick and even Emma and Josh seem to be, but something is keeping me down. Maybe it’s that I don’t trust this sudden new cheeriness, or maybe it’s that it happened without me. Whatever it is, I do my best to push it away and enjoy the day—a bright blue sky, stark, leafless trees, and brown mountains undulating to a hazy horizon.
As we head up the mountain, the first part of the trail the most difficult, we fall into natural groupings. Emma takes Dylan’s hand, and Josh, full of energy, forges ahead, a trailblazer. Nick hangs back to fall in step with me, and we walk in silence for a few moments over the steep terrain until it levels out a little and I can talk without panting.
“Thanks for all of this,” I say to Nick. “I think you’re right. We did need a reset.”
“Well, it’s not as if a hike is going to solve all our problems,” Nick answers with a huff of rueful, sorrow-tinged laughter. “I know that, Ally, even if you think I don’t.”
“I never—”
“You didn’t need to. I knew exactly what you were thinking when you walked into the kitchen this morning. ‘Here goes Nick, thinking he can solve this crisis with some pancakes and a walk through the woods.’ I don’t, you know.”
I am silent, struggling with the truth that I was thinking that, and that Nick knows me so well. “I’m sorry,” I say at last.
Nick nods, accepting my apology, his mind already seeming to have moved on. I stumble over a tree root and he grabs my elbow to steady me.
“Look,” he says. “About last night. The whole Dylan thing.” He lowers his voice, even though Emma and Dylan are at least thirty feet in front of us. “I didn’t mean to sound unfeeling. I know I haven’t been as into the foster thing as you are.”
“You said Dylan was too weird,” I remind him before I can stop myself, and Nick flinches.
“I didn’t really mean it like that.”
“You didn’t?”
“No.” He pauses, and we keep walking, the crunch of dry, brown leaves under our boots the only sound—along with my ragged breathing. I forgot how steep this seemingly short hike could be. “I’ve found it all hard,” he says quietly, and I almost stumble again as I turn to look at him.
“What do you mean?”
Nick is silent for a long moment, long enough for Emma to look back and check we’re following behind. She’s still holding Dylan’s hand, and the sight fills me with both love and gratitude. Josh has found a big stick and is whacking everything he can with it, the way he did when he was Dylan’s age.
“You asked me if it was all a bit too close to home a while back,” he says slowly. “And I told you it wasn’t.”
“Yes…”
“Well, I lied,” I he says flatly. “I don’t think I even realized I was lying. I tend not to think about my childhood at all, and I mean at all.”
I nod, because that is how he has always seemed to me—like an entirely different person to the son of that sad, decrepit woman in Albany I only met once.
“And I wasn’t like Dylan when I was growing up, that much is true. But seeing him—seeing Beth, who is nothing like my mother was, by the way—it just… prodded something inside me. And I started to remember how it felt to be the kid with raggedy clothes, or whose mother didn’t show up to the school play or field day or whatever.”
“Oh, Nick.” I want to reach out to him, hold his hand, but his own are jammed in the pockets of his parka, his head lowered. A display of affection might tip him over the edge, and he’ll clam up again. I know my husband well enough to realize that, at least.
“I’ve kept those memories back for over thirty years. I think some part of me thought I could keep them back forever, if I stayed away from Dylan. If I didn’t get too close.”
“So what has changed your mind?”
Nick releases a long, low breath. “The realization that we’re not invulnerable. You can do everything right, you can make good money, live in a