6
Mallory hadn’t been in a hospital except once. Her best friend Meaghan had gotten a bad cut windsurfing out on the Columbia Gorge and needed nine stitches. Mallory had been with her and taken her to…she looked around…maybe this very room. A shocking change from falling out of a tree just a moment before.
She needed one of Meaghan’s easy laughs right about now.
Except she was two years gone, off at the University of Washington in Seattle. At seventeen, Mallory had always thought they’d go to the same college, friends for life and all that. Now she was a much wiser twenty and knew that choices could separate people. No one—least of all her parents—understood her sudden change from ballet to smokejumping and forest ecology.
But she understood it and that was all that mattered.
“No! It’
