the mooring ropes, holding one in his hand.
“I feel like I already am,” she said, then flushed because that sounded so lame. Still, she could not help smiling. It was a magnificent day, the sky cloudless, the water flat and calm. The surrounding hills wore mantles of new green growth. Everything in sight seemed swollen with abundance, and anything seemed possible.
Daisy knew she would soon be telling him farewell for good, or at least for the foreseeable future. But how could she do that now, when he was taking her flying, for heaven’s sake? She didn’t let herself dwell on it. Instead, she focused on the undeniable splendor of this day and felt grateful to be spending it with Julian.
He jimmied the change in his pocket, seeming oddly nervous. “As a matter of fact, I was planning to—”
“Julian, the plane!” She jumped to the edge of the dock. “It’s getting away.”
Without hesitation, he leaped onto a pontoon, causing the small aircraft to bob wildly. He tossed her a rope. She grabbed it and pulled him back to the dock.
“Thanks,” he said, “I almost lost you before I even had you.”
“You should be more careful.”
“I had my head turned. It’s not like I get to spend every day with the girl of my dreams.”
“What did you call me?” Her heart was racing now.
“The girl of my dreams. It’s cheesy, I know, but that’s how I feel.”
There were many ways to think about what he’d said. She knew he meant it in the best possible way, but she parsed the words, a habit of hers.
Even the word girl. She hadn’t been a girl since the day she’d stared in horror at a home pregnancy test wand and realized her entire life was about to change. And being someone’s dream sounded all well and good, but in actual fact it turned her into a concept, an ideal, and she didn’t want that. She wanted him to know her on the most real level possible.
“Julian—”
“Ready?” he asked, unlocking the plane and flipping open the surprisingly flimsy door. “Climb aboard. I’ll load your stuff after.”
She felt a thrum of excitement in her chest. The interior of the plane was like that of a middling sports car. Vinyl bucket seats, regular seat belts. The view out the front, over the sloping nose of the plane, was certainly different, though. The lake rolled out before them, reflecting the endless sky.
Julian shoved off the dock and climbed into the cockpit. “Put on your headset. It’s going to get noisy in here.”
She gamely donned a bulky headset. “Roger that.” Her voice sounded tinny and artificial. “How do I look?”
“Like Princess Leia, with those big things on the sides of your head.”
He did some more checking of the panel and gauges, and spoke on another frequency to a tower somewhere.
The single engine started, sounding like a lawn mower motor. Daisy did not have a single reservation about his flying. She knew she was safe with him.
He slowly navigated the plane out of the marina, and the whine of the motor crescendoed to a powerful drone. The shoreline flickered past with ever-increasing speed, and then they were swept aloft with a breath-stealing lift of power. The treetops seemed close enough to touch, and the long curved finger of Lake Cayuga beckoned with flashes of silver reflecting the sun.
Daisy leaned back in her seat and laughed aloud. The day was glorious, and life was good.
To most of the world, “New York” meant Manhattan—gridlock traffic, skyscrapers, Times Square, the Statue of Liberty. The rest of the state got little attention. Most people would be surprised by the vast wilderness and variety of the landscape. The brilliant scenery rolled out before them. There were towering hills and river-fed forests, rock formations and cliffs and gorges. They soared over Cherry Ridge Wild Forest and the Catskills Wilderness, overshooting Willow Lake for a view of the famed Mohonk Mountain House, a historic resort. Daisy had gone there with her mom and brother one winter, when their mother was still in the midst of picking up the pieces of her life after divorce.
The thought of her parents’ divorce no longer felt like a fresh, bleeding wound to Daisy. She would always mourn the loss of her family, but if she was being completely honest with herself, even when all four Bellamys lived under one roof, they weren’t quite a family. From her earliest memory, there had been a deep chasm between her parents. She hadn’t understood it then, but she did now. As hard as it had been to accept, her mom and dad simply weren’t meant to be together, no matter how hard they tried.
The breakup had not been easy for either parent, but the rewards were uncountable. Her father had remarried first, turning Daisy’s best friend, Sonnet Romano, into her stepsister. Later, Daisy’s mother had settled in Avalon and joined a law firm. Against all expectations, she’d fallen in love with the local veterinarian and couldn’t be happier.
Daisy sighed with contentment and looked over at Julian. He must have felt her gaze because he turned, too. In high-tech aviator shades, he looked incredible, Top Gun in a pink golf shirt.
The plane swooped down over the Shawangunks, a rocky ridge gouged by deep fissures. This particular wilderness area marked a special time for them both.
“Remember?” he asked, indicating the dramatic striated rock formations above the river. A few rock climbers, looking like four-legged spiders, clung to the sheer faces. Julian had taken her climbing there the first summer they’d met. She had railed and resisted the climb with almost as much force as she had railed and resisted his friendship—at first.
At that time in her life, she had not allowed herself to trust anyone, and that included Julian, even though she was completely intrigued by him. Challenged by him to climb, she had balked, but he’d simply been patient, knowing even then that she would come around. He was the only person she’d ever met who recognized her appetite for adventure. When everyone else dismissed her as another overprivileged city girl destined for a life of shopping and lunch, Julian had challenged her to want more, to be more.
At the summit of the climb, lying exhausted in the powdery red dust, she had done something life-changing. She had taken out what became her last pack of illicit cigarettes and with Julian as witness, made a small fire and burned them all. She never smoked a cigarette again after that day.
It would have been nice if that special, healing day had somehow inoculated her against future bumps and bruises, but it was not to be. At summer’s end, she’d gone back to her senior year at prep school, where she’d managed to screw up a lot more.
A whole lot more.
Julian flew the plane over a waterfall at Deep Notch, where they’d gone ice climbing one winter, another place wrapped in memories of a day like no other. Ice climbing. Who but Julian would think it was a good idea to scale a wall of ice? And who but Julian could talk her into following him? So many of the things she’d done with him involved climbing and striving, embarking on dangerous pursuits, trying extreme sports. The funny thing about following Julian on impossible adventures was that she always seemed to succeed.
Getting to the top of the wall of ice had its own reward, but that was not what she remembered about that day. What she remembered was that, sitting at the frozen summit, shaking and sweating from the treacherous climb, she and Julian had finally shared their first kiss. Before that moment, she’d already known she loved him. What she had learned that day was that she would probably never stop.
“And how about this place?” he asked, his voice thready over the headset.
She wasn’t even going to pretend to be coy. “I remember every minute.”
“Me, too.” He headed for their destination—Willow Lake. From the sky, the small lakeside town of Avalon looked both familiar and crazily different, like something generated by computer animation, perhaps. The town square and lakefront park were