We left about ten minutes later.
Didn’t say where we were going.
Just took the back roads out past town.
Eventually turned off onto an old logging trail and kept driving until the trees opened up into a clearing overlooking the valley below.
JUST US.
I shut the Jeep off and handed her the journal.
Z sat on the tailgate reading through this journal while I stared out over the trees below us.
Every once in a while she’d stop for a few seconds before turning the page again.
I tried not watching her too closely.
Didn’t completely work.
At one point she went back a few pages and read part of something again.
Couldn’t tell which part.
Eventually she closed the journal but kept one hand resting on the cover.
“You really kept all this to yourself?”
I looked over at her for a second.
“Most of it.”
“You wrote all this down instead of talking to me.”
“Wasn’t trying to hide it from you.”
“I know.”
“But you can’t do this anymore.”
I frowned a little.
“Do what?”
“Carry everything by yourself then dump it into a notebook like it doesn’t count because nobody else saw it.”
Didn’t really have an answer for that.
She held the journal out toward me but didn’t let go right away.
“If something happens, you tell me.”
I nodded once.
“And if you can’t tell me,”
she said, lifting the journal slightly,
“then it goes in here.”
My eyes dropped to the journal for a second.
“And if it goes in there, I read it.”
After a few seconds I nodded again.
“Okay.”
Z finally let go of the journal.
Then she looked out over the woods for another few seconds before quietly saying,
“Let’s go home.”