“Wow, you have everything here,” I say, looking at the door leading into the bathroom. “I’ve never been inside one of these before.”

“I like it,” he says. “It makes me appreciate the simple things in life.”

Out of the window, I see an older model Honda Accord.

“That’s my car,” he explains.

“Do you own this, too?”

“No, this was here. It’s a rental, a temporary arrangement.”

“So, you’re not staying here?” I ask.

“I can’t,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. Not understanding, I furrow my brows.

“You know where it is,” Nicholas says in his intense voice without missing a beat. “Once you leave, it won’t be safe for me to stay here.”

33

Olive

When we go see him…

Once I leave. His words reverberate in my mind over and over again. There’s a finality to them.

An end point.

I catch myself fighting back tears. I didn’t come here to get back together with him but I never came here knowing for sure that this would be it.

Him saying that out loud is like a nail in the coffin of our relationship.

Nicholas pours me a cup of tea and we sit down at the dinette, directly across from one another.

“I like it here,” I say, taking a sip of the mint tea.

“Me, too.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Me, too.” He laughs.

“Why did you come here of all places?”

He inhales slowly and then exhales even slower. Then he looks out of the window. “It could be that being out here in the middle of nowhere makes me hard to find,” he says. “But the truth is that I needed to get away. After all of that extravagance, I needed to reconnect with nature just a bit.”

“Well, you’re definitely doing that.”

“I needed to feel like a person again. There have been a few people camping up here but everyone really sticks to themselves. It’s nice.”

I ask him more about what happened after he left and he fills me in on the details.

“When we talked about running away, this was definitely not what I had in mind,” I say with a smile.

“Yeah, no five-star hotels or luxury restaurants and resorts for me. At least, not for a while.”

“You think that will ever change?” I ask and he just shrugs.

When we get hungry, he toasts some garlic bread over the fire.

I make a salad and we dig in. He asks about how everything has been for me and this time I tell him the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I don’t spare any details.

What would be the point? I’m probably never going to see him again so I might as well leave nothing out.

We continue to talk as the sun dips below the pine trees out west and disappears to another place in the world.