Page 3 of The Backtrack
That was all he’d said, but there was so much leftunsaidthat Sam had spent most of the flight filling in the blanks.
Fly safe, because you ran away and owe me one hell of an explanation.
Fly safe, because you’ve avoided me for long enough.
Fly safe, and I won’t be surprised if you bail.
It wasn’t that she didn’twantto see Damon—quite the opposite. She’d wanted to see him for years. He’d been her best friend, and they had so much history together that whenever she thought of her childhood, he was inextricably entwined in it. She wasn’t avoiding him exactly, but the way she’d left things between them had been...bad. Like, hugging him goodbye, promising to come back soon and then just not making good on that at all. She’d been scared that visiting Damon would mean more than simply returning to the small city she never wanted to live in again. But now shewasreturning, and he was texting, so there was no avoiding him, or Tybee.
“We’ve got a bumpy landing.” Sam swiftly changed the subject so she wouldn’t have to explain herself to Rachel. She’d worked hard to keep her past in the past. “Do you have a dad joke picked out?” She shifted her long legs, which had gone numb from too much sitting.
Rachel raised her pierced brow as she closed the flight manual. “I workshopped this one with Aubry. Ready to hear it?”
Pilots had a high rate of divorce—with too much time away from home, it was no wonder—but Aubry and Rachel were the kind of couple that gave Sam hope.
“If your wife approved this, then I’m all ears.” Sam was grateful to hear anything that didn’t involve her own sugar-high thoughts of doom. She picked up the intercom and began to talk. “Hello, this is Captain Leto. We’re about to start our initial descent into the Atlanta, Georgia, area.”
“If you’re going to Atlanta, it’s a perfect seventy-five degrees,” Rachel said into the mic. “There are a few air pockets coming up in our approach, so the ride may get bumpy. Just remember that if the landingisrough, it’s not the captain or copiot’s fault. It’s the asphalt.”
Rachel turned the intercom off and looked at Sam expectantly. Sam allowed a few beats of silence to build out the tension, then slid her sunglasses down her nose.
“It was good,” Sam conceded. “Not as good as the four pains au chocolat, but good.”
Rachel sighed, then turned her focus to the instrument panel. “You’re gonna miss my jokes, even when you’re stretched out on a beach with a cabana boy serving you margaritas.”
Sam wanted to tell Rachel that the closest she’d get to a beach would be looking out the window as she boxed up her old memories, but Rachel didn’t know anything about Sam’s childhood—or what she’d run from. So instead of being honest, Sam swallowed down the sick feeling, either from the pastries or the impending trip—or both—and switched off the autopilot to land the plane.
“This is looking like a rodeo approach,” Sam said. There were gusty winds reported, and she’d have to tame the bucking airplane on the descent.
“Your favorite,” Rachel said.
And she was right. Sam prided herself on hand piloting the smoothest landings possible even in extreme circumstances. Being able to focus on the landing meant she didn’t have to think about Damon, either.
“Been meaning to get us another Superior Airmanship Award.” Sam and Rachel had earned the prestigious honor after a flight where there was a fire in the cabin, and they managed a flawless emergency landing. In the forty years since the award started, they were the only women to ever earn the recognition.
“If anyone can do it, it’s you,” Rachel said. “Let’s get you to your vacation in one piece, shall we?”
“Ten-four.” Unlike with her personal life, she had no problem focusing on doing her job, the one thing she was truly great at.
When Sam landed the plane, there was a round of applause from the cabin, and she was proud of the reason.
Sam sat in the driver’s seat of the rented Mercedes and maneuvered across lanes of highway traffic, sped past lazy rolling hills and drifted into the flatter land near Savannah. Instead of music, an episode ofThis American Lifefeaturing David Sedaris walking the streets of Paris played. She thought the episode would remind her that she had a whole other existence in her apartment in Montmartre, but she barely heard the words as she glanced out the window.
She was struck by how different the area looked. Next to the familiar, distinguished live oak trees covered in moss, were new high-rise, modern luxury townhomes and urban sprawl that she didn’t remember being there. The changes blissfully distracted her, and for a few moments during the ride she lost herself completely to the new surroundings. A lot could change in eleven years, she guessed, just as she’d changed, too.
She’d stopped wearing two-for-one thongs from Target—flip-flop or otherwise—for example. Real grown-up decisions had been made.
As the sun steadily dipped lower behind billboards for fast-food stops, she closed in on Tybee Island. A familiar sky-blue hand-painted sign for the town welcomed her, and she rolled the window down. The scent of salt and suntan lotion bloomed in the air like fragrant flowers as she drove through the main street. Despite the fact that it was fall in some parts of the country, in Tybee there were tourists in cutoff shorts and bikini tops strolling the sidewalk past vibrant storefronts advertising souvenirs, beach apparel and ice cream.
It was unnerving how familiar and foreign coming back felt. To recognize the street names, but not the new stores. To have memories of walking across the concrete, but see it replaced with mosaic tile. This had once been the only place she’d known, and now she felt as if she were visiting for the first time. She no longer belonged in her hometown; she was just another tourist. She’d expected to break out in claustrophobic hives as soon as she arrived, but so much had changed that she found herself more dumbstruck than anything else.
Sam turned onto Chatham Avenue, the street where her childhood home was. A handful of original shingle-style beach cottages remained, but were dwarfed by newer modern waterfront mansions. This was the street where she’d learned to ride a bike, drive a car and daydreamed about the life she’d eventually lead. Though, as she glanced down the line of the freshly paved road, those memories were like a foggy dream.
She should feel some kind of buzz, like a Hallmark level of warm and fuzzies that tied her to this place, right? After all, she was home.Home. There was nothing comforting about that word, though, which felt as heavy as a Boeing 747 on her chest.
That heaviness lingered as she pulled into the sandy driveway of her grandma’s cottage, still enclosed by the same chipped white picket fence. She didn’t immediately turn the car off, but stared at the blue front door’s weathered paint. All she had to do was put the car in Reverse, back out of the driveway and head to the airport she had come from.
But she couldn’t run, not this time, because her grandma needed help and Sam owed her that much. The woman had raised her when her mom refused to. So Sam mustered as much positive energy as she could, reapplied her matte lipstick and killed the engine.
