Page 7 of Mistaken

“I’m sure there won’t be anything weird,” Carson replied, clearly unconcerned. “So we’ll see you here on Saturday.”

Lindsay nodded. “Okay. Be safe, you two.”

“We will,” Sarah said. Or at least, she knew she’d be cautious. She couldn’t vouch for her companion’s actions.

But Carson had a pretty strong sense of self-preservation, so she kind of doubted he’d do anything to put himself in danger. No, he’d probably hotfoot it out of there at the first sign of trouble.

The two of them got out of Lindsay’s Volvo and began walking north on Highway 84. To either side were small ranches and farms, their outbuildings already falling apart from exposure to the wind and weather, fences sagging, private access roads cracked and buckled. A line of cottonwoods on the right picked out the path of the Rio Chama as it meandered through the valley, and thanks to the rain they’d gotten lately, everything was green and lush.

Yes, this was good land. It would be a shame to let it go to waste.

“Nice day,” Carson commented, and Sarah nodded.

“I suppose that’s one good thing about the world as it is now,” she said. “The weather’s gotten cooler and wetter. I remember when things wouldn’t be this green until late July or early August, depending on what the monsoons were doing that year.”

Talking about the weather was safe enough, right?

“Yeah, I guess so,” Carson replied. “I suppose I haven’t really thought about it too much.”

No, he probably wouldn’t. With hindsight, Sarah knew he was the kind of person who didn’t pay much attention to anything outside himself.

As best she could, she shoved the thought away. She didn’t like the guy, but she needed to be civil to him for at least the next couple of hours until they reached the spot where he’d turn off to go to the lake and she’d keep heading north to Ghost Ranch.

“It’ll make farming a lot easier,” she said. “And it looks like there’s already plenty to work with along here. The houses will need to be fixed up, and some of these barns probably would be easier to pull down than try to repair, but — ”

“I wasn’t aware you were so into farming,” Carson cut in, a not entirely pleasant smile tugging at his lips.

She really wasn’t. Or rather, while she knew agriculture was important for the continuation of their community, she hadn’t put a whole lot of thought into the nuts and bolts involved and had been fine with working where she was told to work and not much more.

Come to think of it, she herself hadn’t put a lot of thought into much of anything lately, either. It was easier to cruise through this new life while at least partially checked out…which might have been a large part of the reason why she’d hooked up with Carson in the first place.

“Well, it’s important to the community,” she said, knowing how unconvincing the words sounded even as they left her lips.

One of Carson’s sandy-brown eyebrows lifted. To her relief, though, he didn’t challenge her statement, and instead only responded, “I guess that’s why we’re both here, right? So we can do something for the community?”

“Exactly,” Sarah said, glad that he seemed willing to take her words at face value. But then, he’d never been the type to probe too deeply.

They walked in silence for a while after that, for which she was extremely grateful. The night before, she’d manufactured all sorts of awkward scenarios as to what might happen today, with most of them having Carson grill her over their break-up and demand to have her explain why she’d ever thought leaving someone as awesome as him would be a good idea.

However, he seemed willing to let it alone. For all she knew, he was already seeing someone else. She thought she would have heard about something like that, mostly because it was very difficult to keep secrets in a community as small and interconnected as theirs, but she supposed it was possible that even if one of her friends — and by “friend,” she meant the people she was friendly with, since she didn’t have anything close to a confidant — had heard the news, they might have decided not to pass it along to her.

Whatever the reason, the quiet between her and Carson was almost companionable as they followed Highway 84 along its various curves and bends, until a few hours later, they arrived in Abiquiu. The little town wasn’t much more than a wide spot in the road, with the Abiquiu Inn being one of its main landmarks, but at least it let them know they weren’t too far from the place where they’d have to part ways.

As they walked past the Inn, Sarah couldn’t help feeling a little pang of something that might have been nostalgia, or possibly just simple regret that the place was shuttered and dark and left to decay. She remembered lunch there with her father, how she’d thought the smoked chicken quesadillas were the best thing she’d ever tasted. Even now, she had to admit that she hadn’t eaten many meals that surpassed that one, simple as it might have seemed in retrospect.

Something must have shifted in her expression, because Carson hitched a shoulder in the direction of the low adobe building and said, “You ever stay there?”

“When I was a kid,” she replied. “It was a long time ago.”

A stupid thing to say, she supposed. While she still had a couple of years before she hit thirty, she hadn’t been anything close to a kid for more than a decade, so of course her stay at the Inn would have taken place years earlier.

Carson only nodded, though, and they continued in the same silence that had accompanied them for the past couple of hours. Another forty-five minutes or so of walking, and then they paused by the turn-off for Abiquiu Lake and its recreation areas.

“Guess this is my stop,” he said.

Something about him seemed almost nervous, which felt very out of character. Was he having second thoughts about bravely hiking off into the wilderness?

If that was the case, they’d gone way too far for him to change his mind now.

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