Her smile widens, only for a second, before she remembers she’s furious with me and tamps it down. Then, she sighs, clearly distressed by the sight of me holding onto these ski poles. “I’m going to have to actually help you, aren’t I?”

I do another arm-windmill, banana-peel, double-axis thing on my skis.

“I hate you right now,” she says, but then she’s at my side, showing me what to do, one hand on my lower back. “Like this. And then you’ll push like this.”

Everything is feeling dangerous again.

“I’m expected to move my legs and arms at the same time?”

Jack laughs her terrible, adorable, involuntary laugh. “Yes, it’s a full-body experience.”

I adjust my goggles over my glasses. “Okay. What now? Do we go to the chairlift?”

“No. You gotta crawl before you can walk.”

I do not expect her to mean this quite so literally, but I do, in fact, spend a considerable amount of time crawling in my skis over the course of the next two hours. Jack leads us to a clearing with a small hill where children are all learning how to move in their skis for the first time. Children and me.

Jack is, infuriatingly, an incredible teacher, even if she does hate me right now. Even if after today, we have to stop spending time together. She takes a solid thirty minutes just to help me move my skis and the poles at the same time, then another hour teaching me how to stop, how to turn, how to fall gracefully when falling is the only option. When we’re ready for actual skiing, we still don’t make our way to a chairlift, but to a leisurely trail with a steady decline called the West Leg Road.

Leisurely or not, I still find myself mildly horrified as we stand on the edge of a small downward slope. Sure, there are preteens here, eagerly taking off on their snowboards. Parents are helping their toddlers. And then there’s me, twenty-five and terrified, because I’m just supposed to trust gravity?

I might fly. I might fall. And I have no idea how to protect myself from failing, from having my heart splattered everywhere. Or my body splattered against the trunk of a tree. Beside the trailhead is a sign that reads, “Always Be in Control.”

“I can’t do this.”

“There’s only one way down,” she says. Surely that isn’t true. There must be a secret way off the mountain, an escape hatch for cowards. I can just take my skis and hightail it back to the car. “And honestly, this is more… across than down. We’ve got this,” Jack insists.

We. For at least one more day, we’re a we. “And I’ll be beside you the whole time, whether I want to be or not.”

I take a deep breath. Fly or fall.