Chapter Seventeen

She went up the ridge that night without a light. She didn’t need one for that route.

The rectangle was grey in the dark, the cut grass holding what little the sky gave. She stood at the edge of it, where she had stood shouting at an old man that morning, a different life ago.

She had things to say. Seven years of things, and one new day of things underneath them, and she stood there with all of it and none of it would line up into speech.

She sat down in the cut grass.

She stayed there a long time. The valley made its night sounds and stopped making them and made them again.

“He’ll never see it,” she said, finally, out loud, to nothing.

Nothing answered. Nothing was going to.

“I’m done,” she said.

She came down off the ridge in the dark, and packed before she slept. It didn’t take long. She had never really unpacked.

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He was already running when she got to the track.

Better than he had any right to be — the arms loose, the head quiet, the last forty still alive. She stood at the rail with the kit bag on her shoulder and watched him come off the bend, and waited for him to finish, because you didn’t interrupt a rep, even to end things.

“Ayo. I came to say—”

“Look!” He had her by the wrist before the sentence had anywhere to go. “LOOK. I’ve been doing it every day, you have to see—”

He pulled her off the lanes to the strip of soft dirt along the rail, and pointed, breathless, prouder than a medal.

Two lines of footprints.

Hers — her warm-up strides from these past weeks, pressed into the soft ground. And beside them, set carefully, stride for stride, matched as close as eleven-year-old legs could match them: his.

“Almost yours,” he said.

She looked at the two lines of prints for a long time.

Whatever she had come to say, she didn’t say it. It wasn’t true anymore.

“Run them again tomorrow,” she said. “Wider arms.”

“You’ll be watching?”

“After the Continental.”

He went back to the line at a run.

END OF PART TWO