His last words to her that morning had been “I’ll call you when I land.”
He hadn’t.
With his mom in the hospital, things had undoubtedly been busy, she’d assumed. His sister, Cora—ten years his junior—had been only twelve; his mother had an important career and many responsibilities to juggle. But when Lily called Leo three days later, there was no trace of the soft-spoken, adoring man she’d come to know. Instead, he’d been abrupt with her for the very first time. “I can’t do this right now, Lily. I’ll call you in a few days.”
That had been the last time she’d heard his voice.
A pathetic late-night Google search a few years back told her Leo Grady had graduated from NYU a year later. That he’d been quickly hired at a small tech company in Queens, then at a bigger firm in Manhattan. He didn’t have Facebook. Didn’t have Instagram. Didn’t even have a head shot in his company profile. She didn’t know if he’d married or had kids. Lily both loved and hated how impossible Leo had been to stalk online.
Now, when the ghost from her past disappeared inside the small wooden outhouse, she jogged back over to where Nicole was tending the sizzling pan of potatoes.
“What was that about?” Nic asked. “You get bit?”
“Yeah. Big… bitey thing,” Lily answered vaguely. “Hey, do you want to do orientation this morning?”
Wearing a bewildered frown, Nicole looked at Lily from under the brim of her hat. Nic always did pickup. Lily always did orientation. Not once had they ever traded these roles.
Nicole scooped a big pile of crisp potatoes and onions into an aluminum tray, saying, “Dub, you know the only thing I’d like less than doing orientation is putting my face directly onto this hot pan.”
With a sigh, Lily reached for the clipboard. One of Nicole’s other responsibilities was to pair guests with horses based on the information they provided about height, weight, and riding experience. Unfortunately, the two of them had been doing this so long that Lily rarely looked at the guests’ names and assignments until she was gathering them around the breakfast table to begin orientation. Now she glanced down at the assignment sheet.
Rider: Bradley Daniels
Horse: Bullwinkle
Rider: Walter Gibb
Horse: Dynamite
Rider: Leo Grady
Horse: Ace
Rider: Terrence Trottel
Horse: Calypso
Lily let out a quiet “Well, shit.”
Maybe it’s a different neck, a different set of squared shoulders, a different Leo Grady. Frantically, she flipped through the folder of guest forms. On only the second page her hand froze in midair; the stapled-together photo and form for a man named Bradley fluttered to the ground as Lily stared down at the face of the man she used to know.
She closed her eyes to absorb the final blow. A deep-rooted self-preservation instinct made her scratch around to find a legitimate way out of this. Could they cancel this excursion, cite an incoming storm? Could they claim one of the horses was lame? Could she fake illness?
They could… but long ago Lily had learned it was a waste of everyone’s time to fake anything.
Staring down at the photo, Lily wondered what he was like now. And she wondered why he was here. Her company was called Wilder Adventures, for Christ’s sake. Lily wasn’t exactly hiding.
“Do you remember what you said earlier?” she asked, looking up at Nic. “About the guests? You said there was a loud one, a sweet potato, a creep, and…？”
Nicole gazed to the side, thinking. “A quiet one?”
The quiet one—and what else had Nicole said? That he was cute? Lily looked down at his photo again. Twenty-two-year-old Leo had been cute. He’d been shy and sweet and perpetually lost in thought, but this Leo—he must be thirty-two years old now—was devastating. In the photo, he appeared to be standing on a balcony somewhere, holding a beer and laughing at the photographer. His hair was still the soft, dark mess she remembered, always sticking up in the morning, falling forward on its own. Glimmering dark eyes. His face had lost the softness of youth and sharpened in the years they’d been apart, at once more delicate and more masculine. His cheekbones were sharper, his jaw more angular, his neck still as long as a summer day, his lips just as full as she remembered.
Shiiiiit.
Nicole leaned in, peeking over Lily’s shoulder at what had her so transfixed, and Lily slapped the folder shut, tossing it on the table. Aggressively, she picked up a slab of bacon and started hacking it into thick slices. Each one dropped into the hot cast-iron skillet with a satisfying sizzle.