“No you didn’t. I wanted to come.” I couldn’t remember why I’d agreed to do it. Jesse had talked me into it, of that I was certain. My friend could be very persuasive. He’d gone on about how the trip to Peru would pay for itself with work assignments for both of us—me as a writer and Jesse as a photographer—and that was probably true. But the real reason I’d agreed to the trip was that I had nowhere else I wanted to be. After Claudia’s funeral, I’d drifted around New York, my hometown, in a daze. Then I’d returned to Spain, where I’d been living for the past year. My Barcelona apartment seemed hopelessly empty—even though I’d already been living there alone—and I felt like an inept ghost stumbling through it and bumping into walls. It had been a relief to go along with Jesse’s plan. But I was just as miserable in Peru as I was everywhere else. The awful part was that now I was dragging Jesse down into quicksand with me.

“That’s my girl.” He put his arm around me, and I rested my head on his shoulder. For a minute, we were both quiet. “You hear that?” Jesse asked.

Straining my ears, I could hear a man speaking English with a local accent. “Now, I will tell you of Emperor Pachacutec, who built Machu Picchu. Did you know conquistadors never discovered the site? Everything is exactly as the emperor left it.”

“That’s Diego, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah. Let’s just hope he doesn’t figure out we went AWOL and skipped out on his group.”

Diego had been our guide through our four-day hike along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. He was a sweet man, but he had an unfortunate tendency to make everyone stand in place for an hour at a time while he described the history of a site and the mythology and folklore around it. I got more than enough of that from Jesse.

“He’ll be upset when he finds out we’re gone.”

“But by then, we’ll have had the fun of exploring Machu Picchu while it’s almost empty,” Jesse answered. “Those trainloads of tourists won’t start arrivin’ for an hour. We got the run of the most beautiful sight on earth. C’mon. Let’s get a good head start on everybody else. So long, suckers.”