Oh, gosh.

Oh, fudge.

What if the thing she’d failed hardest was . . . herself?

Some thoughts were too big to accept all at once. She shoved this one frantically to the back of her mind before it could crack her wide open, but traces of it still lingered—like the ghost of a sparkler after you’d waved it through the air. Bright and dangerous and not-really-there.

“I like it here,” she said out loud. “I like—my job.”

Jacob’s serious expression dissolved into a beaming smile. “You do?”

Oh, she did. And not just because so much of it revolved around this man, with his insatiable curiosity and his blunt impatience and his intense eyes. Not just because of Jacob.

But he was on the list of things to like.

“I do,” she confirmed, and for a moment that pleased her—she had a job, just like her parents wanted, and she was getting along very well, and she was even having fun. But then she remembered that all this was temporary. It was a favor Jacob didn’t know he’d asked for. It wasn’t real. In three weeks, she’d be gone, back to her old world, planning obnoxious parties for Florence’s shitty brother even though she barely liked Florence or Florence’s brother or anyone else she knew.

Fuck.

But maybe that was why Castell Cottage came so sweet and so easy; because it wasn’t really for her.

She shoved the last bite of her Mars Bar in her mouth and chewed as the music went from introspective piano to the staccato beat of Hayley Kiyoko’s “Curious.” This conversation was dragging her down, down, down into a mire of confusion when what she wanted was to stay up. For goodness’ sake, this was a friendship date. She was supposed to be enjoying Jacob’s rare and adorably earnest happiness, not sloshing her life’s woes all over him.

So she turned to face him with an almost-smile that would become real in a minute, if he’d take the hint and help. “I think that’s enough talk about my life choices.”

He hesitated, but she saw the moment when he decided to let it go.

She also saw that he wouldn’t let this go forever.

“How did you know,” she asked, “that you wanted to do this? Run a place like this, I mean?”

He shrugged, turning to stare out of the window. “I . . . you know about my childhood. I never did enjoy traveling. But when I was twelve—a couple of years after I arrived in Skybriar—Lucy said we were going on holiday. I was horrified. I suppose, in my mind, you either went on holiday forever or you stayed at home, and one of those things was good and one was bad.”

Her heart squeezed for all the things he didn’t say. Because the fact was, plenty of people lived their lives on the road—entire communities, entire cultures. And those travelers never seemed hollow and restless when they talked about a life on the move.