“Sophie, can I trust you not to hyperventilate?” he asked gently as we drove through town.
“Yeah. I just…” I needed time to think. Maybe to cry? My entire body was encased in ice from the neck down. From the neck up, I was pretty sure my brain was going to boil. “Can you drive me out to the cabin, first? I need to not see my mom, right now.”
“Certainly,” he said, and we made the rest of the drive in silence.
The cabin we’d rented was just down the road from the smokestack in Gay, right on the lakeshore near the Tobacco River. Situated on a hill that sloped down to a pebble- dotted beach, the cedar-sided house wasn’t super fancy, but it was definitely one of the less-weathered properties in the area. We pulled into the paved drive, and I launched myself from the car.
“Sophie, wait!” Neil cursed and turned off the car, then charged to the door after me.
My hands trembled and fumbled with the key, and I couldn’t keep the tears out of my voice. “You have to go pick up Olivia.”
“Olivia is fine, we’re not expected back for another hour, at least.” He gently took the house key from my hand and opened the door. “I want to make sure you’re safe.”
“I’m safe! Why wouldn’t I be safe?” I snapped, kicking my shoes off as I stalked through the entryway. “I’m just upset. And stressed out. And I’m pissed off that I just ran out of my class reunion. That was the whole reason I took time off and we came all the way out here—”
“Not the whole reason,” he interjected.
But I was on a roll. “—and I didn’t even want to go in the first place! I knew something awful was going to happen. I should have listened to myself!”
“You didn’t know something awful was going to happen, you were worried about what people would think of you,” he reminded me. “Certainly not this. It’s one in a million—”
“Let’s not get hyperbolic. There aren’t even a million people in the U.P.” I raked my hand through my previously flawless hair and dropped full-length onto the couch. “What the hell do I do here, Neil?”
He sat in the space between my feet and the end of the sofa and slumped forward with his elbows on his knees. “You have a few options at your disposal. The first, which will involve the least amount of conflict but may create further emotional difficulties, would be to put this all behind you and never think of it, again.”
“That sounds good.” I flung a forearm over my eyes.
“The second, which will involve confrontation of the issue, would be to return to New York, look up Susan, and email her. If the interaction is unpleasant, you’re not in any position where you’ve had to meet her face to face, or don’t have an excuse to avoid her. However, if it is favorable and you’d like to get to know her better, you’re in New York.” There was a charged silence as he considered the third option, the one I knew was coming and which I didn’t really want to hear about. “The third—”
“Look her up while we’re here, discuss everything on some kind of neutral ground, and then go back to New York and have a potentially awkward relationship from afar, wherein we have to acknowledge each other’s existence, but we’re not sure how to proceed with that knowledge.” I pushed myself up to sit beside him, but I wouldn’t look him in the eye. “She knew who I was, Neil. It’s why she ran off to the bathroom.”
“What?” He sat up straight, like he was mortally offended. “You mean she was going to fake sick and leave? We could have stayed. They had a nacho bar.”
I elbowed him, but I wasn’t mad. I couldn’t be, when he was sitting there trying so hard to make me feel better. “Don’t. I’m not going to be able to just laugh this off.”
“I know you won’t.” He put an arm around me and pulled me close. “But this situation is uncharted water. Here, there be monsters, and they need to be dealt with. You can’t forget I’m on your side.”
“Never.”
“And being on your side will occasionally involve me trying to make you laugh, even when things seem dire.”
That was something we certainly had experience with.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I know I won’t do it tonight. I don’t even want to think about it.” I reached up to take off an earring and stopped. “But it might not be up to me.”
“I didn’t want to say. I was waiting for you to get there on your own,” Neil said with a grimace.
My throat tightened. “What if she tries to get in touch with me? What if she knows that I’m a billionaire, now, and she tries to get some money out of me?”