Page 48 of Cruel Summer

She worried about her health.

She worried about what she’d do when she didn’t have her mom in her life, and she wasn’t ready to face that. She just wasn’t ready.

They were close. They always had been. She walked down the street to her childhood home almost every day just to chat for a while. The kids saw their grandma every day. It…

It didn’t seem real.

The vacation rental was huge. Big enough that Logan and Chloe were staying in the same house. The massive windows looked over Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, and they’d had a great couple of days enjoying the little town, the beaches, and the elk herd that slept in the field near the house.

She’d been taking early morning walks in the mist, trying to clear her head so she could put on a brave face for the rest of the day. This was a family vacation. She didn’t want to weigh everyone down with her worries.

With the statistics that lived in her head and told her that no matter how much she wanted to believe in miracles, climbing numbers this soon after the end of a top-line treatment were bad.

She opened up the front door and went outside. The air was sharp and cold, heavy with mist. She inhaled it deeply, closing her eyes.

She stuffed her hands in her pockets and had started down the road when she heard footsteps, pounding harder and faster than her own. She looked up and saw a jogger partially obscured by the fog.

Then he stopped. “Sam?”

It was Logan.

“Oh, hi. I didn’t know you were up,” she said, her shoulders going up to the bottoms of her earlobes.

“I get up and run every morning, and try not to wake anyone up.”

“I’ve been walking. I guess we usually miss each other.”

His mouth turned up into a half smile. “Yeah. I guess we do.”

“Anyway…just walking.”

But he turned and started to walk along with her, as if he’d been invited.

“Any particular reason for the early morning walks?”

“A reason for your run?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh.”

“How’s your mom, Sam?”

She breathed out, a short, painful sound exiting with it. “I don’t think very good. I don’t… I’m just thinking.”

“I get it. You know that, right?”

She paused. “Yeah, I do.”

“Remember what you told me about loss? It’s just shitty. So is stuff like this.”

“Thanks,” she said. It seemed insufficient, but it felt good to have someone say that. To have someone acknowledge how hard it was. “I’m just trying to be normal. I’m trying to have this vacation and be…happy and everything for the kids.”

“You can’t always do that,” he said.

“I want to protect them.”

“I get that. But who’s protecting you?”

---