Chapter 7: Colorado

Colorado changed something. Maybe it was the altitude, or the way the landscape shifted so dramatically from the flatlands — suddenly there were mountains, suddenly the sky was doing something interesting, and neither of them could look at their phones when there was all of that happening outside the windows. They drove with the windows down and talked, and the talking was different from the talking before — before Nebraska, before the diner, before the thing that had been said and was now sitting between them in the car like a third passenger who didn't require a seatbelt. "Tell me what you've been doing," Danny said. "Five years' worth." She told him. Some of it. The job in Seattle that had turned out to be two jobs because her manager left and no one replaced him and she'd simply absorbed the work because that was easier than advocating for herself. The apartment she'd loved and the one she'd hated and the current one which was fine. The year she'd adopted a plant and managed to keep it alive, which she still considered one of her genuine achievements. "What's the plant?" "A pothos. Don't judge me, pothos are harder than people think." "I believe you," he said, and she believed that he meant it. He told her his version: the firm in Boston that had been good for two years and then simply hadn't been, the project he'd almost quit over and then hadn't and was still uncertain about, the apartment that was technically larger than he needed and felt like it every day. "You sound lonely," she said, before she'd fully decided to say it. A pause. "Yeah," he said. "I do. I think I am." The mountains slid past. The road curved and offered new angles on the same peaks, which was a thing mountains did that cities didn't — they changed their face depending on where you stood without actually changing. "Me too," she said. "For what it's worth." "It's worth a lot, actually." She watched the road. He watched the road. The car held them both without commentary, which was the best thing cars were good for.