Page 25 of Lost With My Enemy

And I have no idea what happens after that. Not because I haven't thought about it, but because every version of it requires one of us to bend, and neither of us knows how.

She's a planner in Toronto. I'm a photographer who lives out of duffel bags. She schedules visits with her father a year in advance. I haven't opened my dead mother's boxes in two years. She builds structure to feel safe. I dismantle it to feel free. On paper, we make no sense.

But the paper doesn't know about the canoe, or the rice she trusted me to cook, or the photo she took of me against the Manitoba sky with her thumb in the frame. The paper doesn't know about the way she laughs when she loses the fight against it. The paper doesn't know that she's the first person in two years who's made me want to stop moving.

My phone glows on the floor beside the couch. Kenzie's name. A text from three hours ago I missed during the sunset.

that photo you sent. you look like mom when she was happy. whoever took it, don't let her go.

The water stain on the ceiling is definitely heart-shaped. The universe isn't even being subtle anymore.

Sleep comes eventually, thin and restless, full of prairie sky and a woman who says we were always going to different places with the conviction of someone who's already grieving.

Two hours and forty minutes to Calgary.

Two hours and forty minutes to figure out how to say the thing Griffin told me to say, to a woman who's spent her entire life making sure nobody ever gets close enough to break the salad bowl.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ELISE

The Rocky Mountains appear on the horizon at 11:47 AM, and I almost miss them because I'm staring at my planner.

Today's page is the last one. Day fourteen, written in blue ink two weeks ago in my Toronto apartment at 1 AM, back when this trip was a logistics problem and the man beside me was a stranger with a canoe and a concerning relationship with punctuality.

Day 14: Medicine Hat to Calgary. Distance: 302 km. Drive time: 2 hrs 50 min. Arrival: 2:43 PM MT. Hotel check-in: 3:00 PM. Client walkthrough: August 25, 2:00 PM. Trip complete.

Trip complete. As if fourteen days across a country with Jaxon Mills can be summarized by two words and a check mark.

We haven't spoken since breakfast, which consisted of instant coffee from the farmhouse kitchen, toast he burned and I scraped without comment, and a silence so loud it drowned out the toaster. He held the door for me on the way to the truck. I said thank you. He said no problem. We sounded like strangers at a revolving door.

Last night was a mistake. Not the things I said, because they were true. We are going to different places. His life is here, in the mountains and the wilderness and the countries he photographs. Mine is in Toronto, in client spreadsheets and vendor contracts and a one-bedroom apartment with throw pillows I picked to match the curtains. Our lives don't overlap. The Venn diagram has no middle circle.

The mistake was believing I could say all of that without it costing me something.

"Mountains," Jaxon says, the first word either of us has spoken in ninety minutes.

Through the windshield, the Rockies rise from the prairie like a wall. Snow-capped, massive, sharp against the blue. The transition is sudden. One minute it's flat farmland, the next the earth decides to be vertical, and the effect is staggering.

"I've never seen them in person," I hear myself say.

He glances over, surprised. "Never?"

"I fly to Vancouver in July. Direct flight. I don't see the mountains because I'm on the wrong side of the plane, and I've never asked to switch seats because I book the aisle for legroom."

"You've been flying over these your whole life and never looked."

"I've been efficient my whole life and never looked."

The truck cab is quiet. My planner is open on my lap, the pen loose in my fingers. Two hours to Calgary. Two hours until this ends.

My phone buzzes.

El. I know you're almost there. Before you do the thing where you thank him politely and get out of the truck and never look back, I need you to consider something. You spent two weeks with a man who flipped a canoe, cooked you dinner, and drove you four thousand kilometres across a country, and the thing that scares you most isn't the canoe or the bear warning or the moose. It's the fact that you'd get back in the truck tomorrow if he asked.

Sloane. Always Sloane. Seeing the thing I refuse to see, then texting it to me in plain English.

I don't know what you're talking about.