Total pages in book: 198
Estimated words: 186242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 931(@200wpm)___ 745(@250wpm)___ 621(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 186242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 931(@200wpm)___ 745(@250wpm)___ 621(@300wpm)
I could snoop and perv from a distance. I was a sucker for a gorgeous face—usually dog faces or baby animals but human ones too from time to time. It wouldn’t be a hardship to check out my landlord.
Parking my car alongside the garage apartment, I picked up the envelope with cash that I’d gotten from the bank and got out. Not wanting to get caught by the hot dad who didn’t want to know I existed, I pretty much ran to the front door, knocked on it, then stuffed it halfway under the mat before I got caught.
I collected the bags of groceries I’d bought after leaving Clara and Jackie, grabbed the right key, and hustled for the door.
What had been supposed to be a quick trip to the grocery store ended up taking almost an hour since I had no idea where anything was, but I managed to get more sandwich supplies, cereal, fruit, almond milk, and things to make a few quick dinners. Over the last decade, I’d mastered about a dozen versions of quick, easy dinners I could make with a single small pot—most of the time I would rather eat my own food than what I could have gotten through catering. Those recipes had come in handy over the last two months when I’d gotten fed up with eating out.
Closing the door with my hip, I glanced toward the house and spotted a familiarish face through a window.
A young face.
I paused for a second then waved.
The boy, Amos, lifted a hand shyly. I wondered if he was grounded for the rest of his life. Poor kid.
Back upstairs, in my temporary home, I put my groceries up and made a meal, basically inhaling it. After that, I pulled my mom’s journal out from my backpack, setting the leather-bound book beside a spiral one I’d bought the day after I’d decided to head to Pagosa. Then I found the page I already had memorized but felt like seeing.
I’d driven by the house we’d lived in after the grocery store, and it had left me with something that felt an awful lot like indigestion in the center of my chest. It wasn’t indigestion though. I’d gotten so familiar with the sensation that I knew exactly what it was. I just missed her extra today.
I was lucky because I remembered a lot about her. I’d been thirteen when she’d gone missing, but there were a few things I could recall a lot more clearly than others. Time had softened so many details and watered other memories down, but one of the brightest memories of her had been her absolute love of the outdoors. She would’ve killed it working at the Outdoor Experience, and now that I thought about it . . . well, I guess it was the most perfect job I could have gotten. I was already planning on doing her hikes.
Maybe I didn’t know anything about fishing, camping, or archery, but I’d used to do some of that stuff with her, and I was pretty sure if I’d hated it, I wouldn’t have forgotten. That was something to consider.
Another thing I remembered as well was how much she had loved to catalog things she did. That included keeping track of what had been her favorite hobby in the world: hiking. She used to say it was the best therapy she’d ever found—not that I’d understood what that meant until I’d gotten a lot older.
The problem was, she hadn’t written things down in order of easiest to hardest. She’d done random ones, and over the last two weeks, I had already done the grunt work of finding the ratings for their difficulties and figuring out how long each trail was.
Because I wasn’t used to the altitude, and I didn’t know yet how long I was going to actually be here, I had to start with the easiest and shortest and work my way up from there. I knew exactly what hike I would do first. Clara and I hadn’t talked about long-term scheduling, but I’d eyed the shop’s hours on the way out and saw it was closed on Mondays. I figured that for sure would be my day off, obviously. Now I’d just have to see what other day I could get too. If she wanted me to only work part-time, that was good. We’d . . . see. And that was perfect.
My plan was to start jumping rope tomorrow to give my lungs some exercise in preparation. I’d been walking and jogging almost every day lately, when I wasn’t driving somewhere new, but I didn’t want to give myself altitude sickness my first week here—at least that’s what all the travel forums I’d read had warned against. There really wasn’t anywhere to walk around here though, other than driving into town to a trail or settling for the side of the road, which didn’t exactly sound safe.