Page 98 of Lady and the Camp
One person above all came to mind who I wanted to tell first.
Dusk settled in. With Twila on her way home, I closed up shop at the office and headed out.
I stopped short after exiting my office. Hudson appeared in the office doorway. She set down a bag and purse. Her rolling suitcase wobbled unsteadily beside her.
A sense of dread hit. “You’re leaving.”
She tugged at her hair. “Yeah.”
Please stay.
But the words wouldn’t come. She’d said she give one more day and she had. And it had been a disaster.
I approached her carefully. “It’s not your fault.”
“It’sabsolutelymy fault.” She had on the drapey robe again, the thing she’d worn her first day. She wore it over a plain shirt and shorts. A sort of half in, half out of camp look. “I heard Maggie’s friend at the Trail Blazers is coming back to replace me.”
As if she could be replaced. By anybody. “Maggie did some reconciling of her own. We all met—Maggie, Brycen, and me, to make some tentative plans for the two camps.”
She remained in the doorway.Go to her. Hold her. Protect her.
But I sensed she didn’t want that from me.
I scuffed my boot against the floor. “I’ve got a plan…with Brycen. It feels weird saying that. He apologized for, well, a lot of things. The split, and how he didn’t listen to us when we stressed the importance of our camp’s values. The Trail Blazers had a big cancellation with one of their groups coming in. Some of his plans went sideways, and a few counselors quit. Things aren’t as perfect as they’d seemed.”
None of this really mattered right now, but I found myself filling the silence anyway. “We talked about merging resources. There’s a lot to figure out. For now, I’m here.”
“You’re not fired.” She said it like a statement, as if not quite believing it.
“No.” I’d handled the trespassing the best I knew how and the parents confirmed that. “Only two families pulled their kids. And they weren’t mad so much as shaken up.”
She let out a big sigh. “That’s good news. I thought I cost you your job. I’ve been sort of hiding out until the last minute. Until I had to go.”
Hiding from me. And us.
And now she was leaving.
“My days here are numbered,” I said. “It just depends how things shake out.”
She flinched.
I hit a nerve. “I’m not blaming you. I was never cut out for this job. You helped me see I could reach for bigger things. That I hadn’t even been trying to go for what I said I wanted. So, I went for it. I applied for the job in Colorado.”
Her face brightened. “Yeah?”
“While I was on the phone with a parent asking me to describe whether, and I quote,the cops were hot, an email came in about my job application. They want an interview.”
“That’s amazing, Lucas.” When she smiled, my chest strained. She wrapped her arms around herself in that way she did to hold herself together.
“It’s a video interview. If they like me, I fly out to check out the program in person.”
She nodded, staring past me before connecting her attention again. “Really, Lucas. It’s great. I’m proud of you. It takes guts to put yourself out there.”
Out there being nowhere near Hudson. Whether she returned to Los Angeles or came back to Michigan, I’d be thousands of miles from her either way. Maybe she’d go off traveling and we’d be even farther apart.
But this job was my dream. I had to give it a shot.
And that was why I couldn’t ask her to stay. She wouldn’t ask me to give up my dream, and I couldn’t ask her to stay at this camp any longer than she had to. With the Krom threat contained, she had no reason to be here.
