Page 103 of Shared By the Mountain Men

But I had to saysomething.Especially before Jack told them what I was doing. They deserved to hear it from me. At the very least, I owed them that.

My phone rang, and I welcomed the distraction. “Hi, Mom.”

“Have you been kidnapped?” she demanded.

“Why would you think I’ve been kidnapped?”

“I’m looking at your location on Find My Friends. You’re on Route 135, heading out of town.”

“Wow, you’re acting kind of stalkerish, Mom.”

“If worrying about my only daughter makes me a stalker, then I will proudly stalk you until I’m buried in the cold ground.”

“Geez, Mom,” I muttered. “No, I haven’t been kidnapped. I’m in a taxi on the way to Ouray. I’m resuming my hike tomorrow.”

There was a pregnant pause on the line. “Yesterday you told me you needed at least another week to heal.”

“I was wrong! I woke up this morning and my ankle was fine. Isn’t that great?”

Another pause. The kind of pause where a mom was magically reading their child’s mind.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Why would something be wrong?”

Behind us, a car honked.

“You sound like something is wrong,” Mom insisted. “Are you sure you’re ready to hike again? I don’t want you to rush back into things and injure yourself.”

“I’m positive,” I said in my most reassuring voice. The tone I’d perfected over the years to keep her from overreacting. “Trust me, I’m ready to go. I’m excited to get back on the trail! I’ve spent too much time sitting around.”

There was another honk from the car behind us. The taxi driver glanced in his mirror and muttered, “Go around.”

“As long as you’re sure that you’re ready,” Mom said skeptically. “I want you to give me daily updates.”

“I’m not going to give you daily updates, Mom.”

“At least for the first week. You can do that for your poor mother, can’t you?”

“I won’t have cell signal every day, but I promise to text you every time I do.”

The honking continued. The taxi driver grumbled something to himself.

“You should have bought one of those emergency satellite devices,” Mom went on. “So you can always communicate. I don’t like it when I can’t get in touch with you.”

That’s what I like most about this hike, I thought to myself. But what I said out loud was, “Those are expensive.”

“What’s your problem, asshole?” the taxi driver muttered.

I looked over my shoulder. The car behind us was flashing its flights. Wherever they were going, they were in a hurry, and this was a small two-lane road.

“You should have bought it anyway,” Mom insisted. “You could have asked us for the money. What if there’s an emergency?”

“There’s not going to be…”

“You already had one emergency,” she interrupted. “It might happen again. You don’t know.”

The car behind us revved its engine and moved into the incoming lane to try to pass us. It appeared alongside us, but then slowed down to match our speed rather than passing.

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