A Little Too Late (Madigan Mountain #1)(27)

I hold my breath, wondering if she’ll say more. She doesn’t. Instead, she burrows a little closer to me, pressing her face against my arm.

Not that I want to see her suffer, but drunk Ava is a hoot. Smiling into the darkness, I lift my arm so it doesn’t block her airway. She moves into the open space, scooting closer, nestling her sleeping face on my bare chest.

Then she lets out a comfortable sigh.

Well, shit. I forget to breathe for a long beat. It’s been a million years since I held Ava. And I hadn’t planned on doing it tonight.

The truth is, I haven’t held anyone in the last ten years. Not enthusiastically, anyway. I’d not been a dick about it, but after I left Ava, I never had the urge to get too close to anyone else. I became the kind of lover who’s generous in the moment but then gets the hell out when the fun is over.

But here I am again, Ava’s soft breath on my bare chest. I used to love this. We spent many happy nights curled into a twin-sized bed. After exhausting each other, we’d lie there, talking in the dark. She told me about her crappy home life—a father who’d left the family when she was young. A mother who somehow resented her for it. The yelling. The fighting.

And in return, I told her… not much. I guess I told her about my big dreams on the ski slopes. And how it was a huge longshot for me to make Team USA, but I still wanted to try.

I didn’t tell her much about my mother’s death a couple years before we met.

I didn’t tell her how angry and cold my father became afterwards.

I didn’t tell her about the awful black cloud that had hung over my head for so long. How I’d partied like a rock star and skied like a daredevil just to try to shake it off. Just to feel things again.

Or how I felt the darkness lift the very moment I first spoke to her in that pottery class. Loving Ava had cured me of the sad fog I used to live inside.

Tonight, I’d told Ava that I’d left her so that she could be happy. And she’d called me on it immediately. That makes no sense. Even plowed, she’d called me on it.

When I was twenty-two, I was absolutely sure that I was taking the only option available to me. I knew with a dark certainty that it was true.

But right now, lying here listening to her breathe, I can’t fathom why. I can’t call up even a wisp of that old logic. It’s gone, like wood smoke leaving a chimney, reaching the nighttime air.

I turn my chin a fractional degree and place a soft kiss to her hair. Then I lie back on the pillow and try to sleep.





CHAPTER 13




MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE, VERMONT





January 2012

Reed is in the library. He’s supposed to be writing a paper for this year’s J-term class—a retrospective on food and culture.

He should already have written five pages on the origins of modern breadmaking, but instead, he’s doing online research for next year. He’s dreaming about what the future holds. Skiing for him. Med school applications for Ava. And a baby for both of them.

He has a hundred new bookmarks on his web browser. Lamaze classes, baby names, US ski team qualifiers, apartments for rent in Colorado.

He and Ava lie awake in his bed each night for hours, discussing the possibilities. They might have to move home to Penny Ridge for a while after he graduates. He can work during the spring and summer and tap his trust fund during ski season.

Ava is experiencing a lot of emotions. She says the hormones are making her cry about everything. “Even dog-food commercials. It’s like living on a roller coaster. Including the nausea.”

There has been a lot of puking, but Reed takes this in stride, holding her hair and carrying wet wipes and mouthwash in his backpack wherever they go. And she is so grateful.

She can’t wait to feel a little better. Otherwise, money is her greatest fear. “My mother won’t help me at all.”

He’s done his best to reassure her. “I have some money, and I’m not afraid of hard work. We’re the lucky ones, baby. You’re graduating right on time, and so will I. Not everybody has the advantages we do.”

Another young man might be overwhelmed by all the obligations and possibilities, but not Reed. He feels focused and deeply optimistic for the first time in a long while.

Snow falls past the library window as he opens up a new browser tab and googles how to get a marriage license in Vermont. He’s thinking about proposing when Ava graduates next month. Eloping sounds like fun. His mother isn’t around to help him plan a wedding, and Ava barely speaks to hers…

His phone lights up with a message from Ava. His smile is automatic as he picks it up.

When he reads the text, his smile slides right off his face.





At the hospital, Reed notices how kind the nurses are to Ava. So gentle with their hands and so soothing with their words as she waits for the doctor to come into the room and talk to them.

But Reed’s heart is already a heavy weight inside his chest. He’s been here before. He’s smelled the hospital disinfectant and heard the uncaring buzz of the fluorescent lights.

The kindness of the nurses is almost worse, because he already knows they lie. Sometimes everything isn’t going to be okay. Sometimes everything goes to shit right before your eyes— like when your mother’s odd clumsiness and forgetfulness turn out to be Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a disease so rare that the doctor has never seen another case in his lifetime.