Restless, I got up and headed over to the window. The icy slush slapped against the pane, making me regret not biting the bullet and ordering up a toasty fire. I peered through the frost that crept along the edges of the frame, seeing just a glimpse of a single lantern below and then a vast open shadow where the mountains lingered just out of sight. Another person might feel lonely. Another person might look out into all that inky blackness and see the one tiny light from just the one lantern and wonder if there was anyone else out there at all.
Another person might. But I didn’t get lonely. You couldn’t be lonely unless you allowed yourself to feel it, and I’d learned at an early age to steel myself against that. To stiff upper lip it, to spine straighten and stand tall and turn what possibly could have been lonely feelings into a deep and certain resolve. A resolve that had protected and shielded me through seven different foster homes, keeping me focused on school and work rather than friends and family.
Now, as an adult, I had the friends. As far as the family . . .
I sighed, shook my head, and turned back to my room. Seeing that it was late enough now to justify going to sleep, I pulled on my pajamas and crawled between the sheets. Hmm, a bit thin and crackly. I grabbed another Post-it, wrote the words thread count quickly, and slapped it on the front of my planner. The to-do list was growing already and Clara Morgan hadn’t even officially arrived.
I flipped off the lights, slipped farther down into the bed, and listened to the squeaks and creaks of an old building turning in for the night. A slight whistle from the radiator in the corner, icy slush still hitting the window—all noises a blessed television would tune out.
Turning on another travel podcast, this one about the central market in Istanbul, I willed my body to shut down and rest. My last thought before slipping into sleep was that if Archie Bryant knew who I really was all along, then he really was an ass for not saying so.
Archie Bryant. Pffft.
The next morning was clear and cold. When my alarm went off at my usual five thirty, I woke up groggy and foggy. I hadn’t slept well, which was unusual. I was on the road so much, I actually slept better in hotels than at home. Occupational hazard I guess. It wasn’t just that the bed wasn’t comfortable—it was a bit soft and sagged in the middle slightly—but it wasn’t anything I could put my finger on. I’d just spent the better part of the night flipping and flopping.
I thought about indulging in a rare occurrence, an extra nine-minute snooze, but now that the Bryant family knew I was on the property, I needed to be ready for whatever might come at me today. The first thing I’d do, however, was get in a run.
I’d always been a runner, it was something I’d picked up early on, around seventh grade. I was fast as a kid, but I quickly realized that what I really had was endurance. I was energetic almost to a fault when I was small, something I’d been reminded of frequently. But put me on a cross-country course and I could run for days. Hot, cold, rainy, it didn’t matter as long as I could feel the ground beneath me and hear that steady drum of my feet passing mile four, mile five, mile six, and on and on and on.
All runners know when you hit a certain point, your body just takes over and you sink into your rhythm. I did my best planning when I was running. The ideas took shape, solutions to problems were presented in a coherent way, and a plan came together as I moved over whatever terrain I was running on.
I was nineteen when I completed my first marathon. It was the year I was in Santa Barbara with Roxie and Natalie, and I’d gotten it into my head that I could do it. My friends hated running, exercise of any kind wasn’t something to enjoy, it was merely something to be suffered through occasionally when they were trying to work off that entire batch of churros we’d all consumed in our pastry class. Mine were inedible. Natalie’s may have been toxic. But Roxie’s were epic.
So yeah, I ran alone mostly. After that first marathon it was like a light went on, and I realized there was an entire community of road warriors just like me who loved to run through that perfect pain that comes when you push your body to do something, especially when it’s pretty sure it can’t but does it anyway. The mind over matter, conquering that little voice in your head that tells you to stop, it’s too much, it’s too hard, you can’t do it.
I could do it. And I ran my ass off up and down the California coast that year, addicted to the thrill of crossing that finish line. A fair swimmer and a pretty good bike rider, I was twenty-one when I completed my first triathlon. I had to train harder for that than anything, the water and cycle portions not coming to me as naturally as running, but as I became more and more efficient in these sports, I began to enjoy triathlons almost as much as marathons.
I was always training. I was always conditioning. And I was always either recovering from a race or getting ready for one.
My line of work lent itself perfectly to this lifestyle, and a lifestyle is exactly what it was. I could never call what I did a hobby, because it really was a key part of everything and anything I did.
I was in great shape, so I could indulge in food and wine as I pleased, but I still exercised moderation in all things because while an extra slice of chocolate cake might not stick around long as unburned calories in my body, it could throw my sugar off, make me sluggish, and make a five-mile run—my usual three to four days per week—pure hell.
I slipped into leggings and a T-shirt, laced up my running shoes, and headed down to the gym.
Oh boy.
The “gym” at Bryant Mountain House was . . . oh man, it just was. Added onto the main house sometime in the 1920s as a “gymnasium,” it’d been overhauled in the 1980s when Jane Fonda fever swept the country and then put into dry dock ever since. It was huge, but that was all it had going for it. There were a few ancient exercise bikes, some free weights and benches, an honest to God NordicTrack next to a row of honest to wow ThighMasters. All along the walls were ballet studio mirrors interspersed with inspirational posters, including a cat that was still desperately Hangin’ In There. But underneath the high-gloss mauve and turquoise I was now becoming accustomed to as the Bryant palette, there were beautiful wide-planked floors of pumpkin-colored pine. Faint outlines of the original “gymnasium” were still evident here and there along the floor, and each end of the gym was, of course, anchored by fireplaces.
And tucked into a corner, one new piece of equipment—a state-of-the-art treadmill.