Page 6 of Face Her Fear

Brian laughed. “You can’t tell?”

She shrugged. “This kind of stuff? Therapy? There’s never a moment where I suddenly feel better. It’s more of a gradual effect. I get a little more sleep at night. I stop wanting to down a bottle of Wild Turkey every time something goes wrong. I ask for help when I wouldn’t have in the past. I talk with my husband instead of hiding my feelings behind work.”

Brian nodded along with her words. “You’re saying you won’t know if this has helped until later?”

“I mean, I guess.” Uncomfortable with the line of questioning, Josie asked, “Is it helping you?”

He looked toward the trees that lined the area at the back of the cabins. He slid the vape pen out of his pocket and used its edge to scratch at a burn scar on his wrist. Snowflakes began falling, small and light. They landed in his hair, twinkling. He didn’t seem to notice. His eyes had a faraway, unfocused look, as if he was no longer present but stuck in some pocket of time from his past. Josie had seen it happen in their group sessions whenever he talked about the fire at the foster home. Sandrine often told him not to disassociate and to stay present.

“Brian?” Josie said.

He blinked, awareness coming back into his eyes, and gave her a weak smile. “Sorry. I was—”

“I know,” Josie said. “You don’t have to explain.”

He rolled his vape pen in his palm. “I want to feel better,” he said. “But I just wonder if there are some scars that aren’t meant to heal.”

FIVE

The snow fell harder as Josie left Brian behind the cabin and trudged back up the hill. It wasn’t yet heavy enough to cover any surfaces, but ominous gray clouds hung low in the sky, portending a storm. At this altitude, Josie felt as if she could reach up and touch them. It was only a matter of time before they unleashed the rest of their contents. This was what she’d been worried about—a bad snowstorm. While she had been enjoying the retreat, she was concerned about them getting stuck on the mountain. Sandrine had chosen the property for its isolation but leaving the camp would not be easy—or even possible—if a big enough storm came through.

Before Josie had left home, she’d checked the forecast for Sullivan County. A week ago, there had been a chance of snow during the late part of the week, but the weather models predicted everything from a dusting to several feet. Basically, meteorologists didn’t know what would happen. Without any word from civilization since then, Josie had no idea what the forecast called for now. Although she’d charged her cell phone, there was no Wi-Fi or service in her cabin so she couldn’t check. The day before, as she passed back and forth between her cabin and the main house, she’d noticed a change in the air around her. There was a heaviness, a thickness to the atmosphere that usually preceded a significant amount of snow. It wasn’t something she could explain but from growing up in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania, Josie knew what it felt like.

She was afraid they were about to get hit with a blizzard.

She had said as much to Sandrine after breakfast the day before, but this notion had been dismissed immediately. “If I thought that there was any chance of a storm this week, I would have postponed the retreat.”

Josie pulled her knit hat down more firmly over her black hair and then felt for her cell phone inside her coat pocket once more. The trek was taking longer than she expected. She hadn’t been this far from the cabins since her arrival when she had taken her free time to get an idea of what lay beyond the camp. If she hoped to get even one bar on her cell phone, she had to get to the highest point possible. Even as her breath puffed out before her, sweat dampened her back. Her calves burned but her nose felt frozen. The wind whipped through the barren tree trunks, spinning the snowflakes into tiny funnels that twirled furiously around her before breaking apart. The snap of a branch stopped her. She scanned the naked tree trunks and large boulders around her but saw no one. Hearing nothing more, she continued on, climbing until she came to a small clearing near the summit of the mountain.

She took off her gloves and jammed them into her right pocket. From her left pocket, she pulled out her phone. Along with it, a crumpled tissue and a folded piece of notebook paper tumbled out, fluttering to the frozen ground. The tissue bounced away like a tumbleweed. Josie used the toe of her boot to capture the paper.

“Shit,” she muttered.

She flashed back to sitting at her desk at work, phone trapped between her ear and her shoulder as she scribbled notes onto the small pad she kept next to her computer. She had listened to the voice on the other end of the line while she jotted down words she didn’t yet understand. Words she knew in her heart she never wanted to understand. Some whimsical and childlike part of her wondered now if she let the slip fly out from under her boot and into the sky, would her problem fly away as well? Like a magic trick?

Afterward, she’d torn the page from her notepad and stuffed it into her coat pocket before anyone could see it. Later, at home, Noah had caught her reading it. He’d pressed her on the contents, and she had told him. She could still remember the look on his face. It had hollowed her out, hurting her in ways she hadn’t been hurt in years.

Feeling as if she’d been punched in the stomach, she’d accused him, “My God. You’re disappointed.”

He had looked up from the paper, confusion creasing his forehead. His hazel eyes told her everything she needed to know, even before he spoke. “I’m…” he’d faltered. “I—I mean, aren’t you disappointed?”

That was a few days before she left for the retreat, and yet it seemed like an eternity.

Another noise startled her from her thoughts. Steps crunching over dead leaves and hard-packed dirt. As she bent to retrieve the page, a scuffed pair of brown work boots appeared before her. In her chest, her heart did a strange little flutter. Her mind was trying to make sense of this other presence so far from the camp when a large, wrinkled hand with hairy knuckles plucked the notebook paper from under her foot. The next thing that Josie saw was the back of a man’s head. Thick gray hair curled at the nape of a ruddy neck. The collar of a flannel shirt peeked out of a thick blue coat. Josie exhaled, relieved.

“Cooper,” she said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

He stood and smiled at her, yellowed teeth showing through his white beard. He was about a foot taller than Josie and although he was likely in his seventies, he was one of the sturdiest-looking people Josie had ever met—broad shoulders, thick forearms, and feet that could put a Sasquatch to shame. He handed her the slip of paper. “Looks like you dropped this.”

Even though he had likely not seen anything written on the page—and even if he had, the words would mean nothing to him—Josie felt her face flame as she took it from him. She stuffed it back into her pocket, along with her phone. “Thanks,” she said. “What are you doing up here?”

Cooper took a slow look around them. He held out a hand to catch some of the snowflakes which were growing fatter and heavier. “The better question is what areyoudoing up here?”

It wasn’t lost on Josie that he’d answered her question with another question. “I was taking a walk,” she said.

Blue eyes sparkled from beneath his bushy white brows. “Nobody comes up here just to take a walk.”

Josie couldn’t tell if he was teasing her or trying to get her to admit to doing something that Sandrine would definitely frown on. Regardless, she didn’t owe him an explanation so she repeated her question. “What are you doing up here?”

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