Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

DANICA

Danica always forgot how much of a love/hate relationship she had with skiing. There was a certain kind of bliss in carving down the mountain, enjoying the trees rushing past, shifting your weight and just losing yourself in the flow. Her mind was quiet as she focused on the gliding sound of her skis in the snow, the laughter and shouts of skiers and snowboarders on the lifts and skiing around her, and even the terror-inducing sound of children laughing somewhere behind her. Kids on skis were fearless and always cut way too close for comfort.

On the other hand, her ski boots never fit quite right for the first few hours. She was a bit out of practice and had to keep reminding herself about the ski positions of pizza and french fries, and her face was cold, even under the sherpa neck gaiter and hood she’d brought. Her helmet strap rubbed on her chin, her boots chafed against her shins, and she was painfully out of breath.

It was 10 a.m. and she was already looking forward to the Après part of the day.

People knew Telluride for its expert runs, but she was by no means an expert. Pete and Izzy had disappeared to find the black runs further up the mountain, but Kiera, Maggie, and Danica stuck to the blues. Kiera probably would have been fine with Pete and Izzy, but Danica had a feeling that Kiera was doing easier runs just to stick with her, which was both embarrassing and sweet.

“I’m nervous about how many layers I have on,” Maggie confessed on the lift part-way through the morning. Danica clutched the bar, too afraid of heights to look down, and was only half-listening. Was the seat rocking back and forth slightly, or was that just her imagination? Though she was curious about the seat’s connection to the lift, she stared straight ahead, worried extra movement would make her sick.

Kiera nodded and laughed. “Is it because you’re worried you won’t get off all the layers before peeing yourself thanks to birthing watermelon-sized children? Because that’s my problem.”

“Exactly. I’m a little afraid I’m gonna pee anytime I fall,” Maggie said with a snort.

“I’ve already peed a little like three times.”

“Was one when you sneezed earlier?’

“Yeah! How did you know?” Kiera said, smacking her leg in amusement.

“Because I thought to myself, wow, I’d have peed a little if I had that sneeze,” Maggie said.

Although Danica tried not to professionally deal with any human over ten pounds, she was around a lot of mothers and parents who had recently given birth. She’d seen it all. Usually while telling them, ‘Please don’t faint, I don’t do well with adults.’

“Danica, are you and Eddie planning on having kids?” Maggie asked, leaning past Kiera to look at her. The sight of Maggie leaning forward on the lift made Danica very, very nervous.

“We never really talked about it,” Danica confessed, nervously fidgeting with her goggles that were raised over her helmet. “I don’t know if I want to.”

“You’re engaged and you’ve never talked about kids?” Maggie asked, her eyes wide.

“We’re 37, babe, you’re kind of at a point where you’d better figure that out,” Kiera said in a way that only Kiera could get away with.

“I knew a mom last year who was 52,” Danica said with a shrug as her brain frantically tried to redirect the conversation. “She had twins.”

“I’m tired just thinking about that,” Maggie said with a sigh. “Don’t you love babies, though, since you work with them?”

Danica had been asked that question twelve thousand times. She liked kids, sure. But what made her choose neonatology was that she loved the challenge of preemies, especially the teeny tiny ones called micropreemies. “I have seen too much to try it myself, I’m pretty sure. I think I’m more likely to adopt one of my patients than have my own.”

“Oh man, I foster-failed on two dogs, so I totally get that,” Maggie said with a sincere smile. “Not that that’s the same, but comparatively, they’re both cute things that need you.”

Danica laughed. “You’d know better than me. I haven’t brought one home yet, but I’ve been more than tempted. I have a colleague who has fostered four of our NICU kids and fantastic families have adopted them.”

“I love that, and also it makes me kind of sad to think about tiny babies that need families,” Kiera said.

“We also have volunteers who come in and cuddle babies,” Danica offered, desperate to move the spotlight off of herself. “They get to just hold a baby for a few hours.” Both Kiera and Maggie respond with meaningful “aww” sounds. Danica was a little jealous of the volunteers that got to snuggle babies. She sometimes helped out with the bedside things in the NICU, taking part in diaper changes or bottle feeding when she wasn’t busy, but those times were rare and only when there weren’t as many babies on the unit. She had to be prepared in case a patient coded or something else went wrong, and it was difficult to stop a hungry, growing baby when they were halfway through a bottle. Still, there were certain families that she loved more than others, and she made extra excuses to stop in their rooms and chat, even about movies or books. Some families were in the NICU for months and months, and she thought the normalcy helped them just as much as it helped her during those long shifts.

“Did you guys hear Izzy’s divorce went through?” Maggie asked as the lift lowered toward the ground. Danica was endlessly grateful to change the subject away from herself and distract herself from the impending challenge of gracefully dismounting from a chairlift. No matter how many times Danica had skied, getting off of the lift gracefully was always something that made her a bit nervous. She could slip and fall in front of a bunch of people, and the lifties would have to come help her, or worse, stop the lift altogether.

“I think I saw it on Facebook? But I’ve been trying to avoid that hellscape, so I haven’t seen much,” Kiera said.

“What does she do for work, again?” Danica and Izzy had never been the closest, and she’d only seen her once since college at Maggie’s wedding.

Maggie shrugged. “She works in a bar, but I don’t know much.”

They made their way toward the top of the run they’d picked out, a gradual, chill blue that wouldn’t require too much energy, given how tired they all already were.

Danica followed the other two down the mountain, taking her time, breathing deep

Izzy and Pete had been best friends back in college. They’d been inseparable, whereas Kiera and Danica were also closer to one another than the rest of the group. Maggie was close with everyone, like some twenty-year-old Mercutio who had never had a bad word said about her. Maggie got along well with Izzy, but Izzy had never warmed to Danica, regardless of how much Danica tried to get along with her. Kiera had always thought it was because Izzy had feelings for Pete, but Maggie was confident that it was because Izzy was jealous of Danica’s grades and achievements.

That theory had never sat quite right for Danica though. Danica had been a straight A student on the pre-med track, she’d worked her ass off for scholarships, and she tutored other students on the side. But Izzy was more of a free spirit, a communications major — whatever that meant — and often skipped classes because she was too high to do anything but lie on her bed and listen to music.

Really, Danica chalked it up to the fact that they had almost nothing in common. There was only one tiny sliver of overlap in their friendship Venn diagram, and that overlap was Pete.

Pete was easy to love. She was fun and spontaneous and kind. She was always laughing. It also helped that Pete was stunning, just one of those annoyingly beautiful people. Pete and Maggie had been directly across the hall from Kiera and Danica in their first year of college at Colorado State University. Izzy lived just down the hall, but became practically a third roommate to Maggie and Pete that first year. She slept more often on the futon in their dorm than in her own room. The friendship between the five of them was set in stone on their very first day, when Kiera had suggested they go to the mall to get pet fish for their rooms. They rode the bus to the mall — none of them had brought their cars to school — and bought fish and small tanks. On the bus ride home, the bumpy ride was a death sentence for most of their fish, and their night ended with four fishy funerals in the bathroom. Pete was the only one who had managed to keep her fish alive, and so her fish became their communal fish, a shared daughter who lived three entire years, despite the not-exactly-nurturing environment of a freshman college dorm.

“Hey, what was our fish’s name?” Danica called out to Kiera. “I can’t remember.”

“Gilly Joel?” Maggie called out.

“No, that was our fish in the house during our last year. Pete named the first fish George,” Kiera said.

“It was Georgia O’Reef, thank you very much,” Pete said, her voice startlingly close.

Having no idea that Pete had caught up to them, Danica jumped in surprise. She didn’t consider herself a normally clumsy person, and she hated the way skis and ice had now twice made her lose control of her legs. She lost her balance, flailing her poles as she fell sideways onto her hip, her ankles screaming in pain as they bent in her boots. Damn, she’d been proud of herself for not falling more than seven times already, which was her best record. Being a casual skier, at least in her case, meant that she spent the first two days of any ski trip trying desperately to remember what she was meant to be doing.

Pete looked effortlessly cool as she slid to a stop near Danica, bending down and unhooking her binding before stepping off her snowboard with one boot. “You good?” she asked, reaching out to help Danica up.

Danica waved away the hand that was offered to her. “I was fine until you crept up on me like a... creeping creep.”

“A creeping creep,” Pete said, her eyes widening in amusement as she lifted her goggles onto her helmet to look at Danica. “Wordsmith Wendell with the deep cuts here.”

Kiera, Maggie, and Izzy stood near the side of the run, watching. “Are you hurt, Dani?” Kiera asked.

“Just my pride,” Danica responded with a groan, her skis sliding awkwardly as she moved to get up.

Pete reached out again and Danica waved her off, her own annoyance growing. “I don’t need you,” Danica bit out, then paused at the surprise on Pete’s face. She cleared her throat. “I don’t need your help.”

Pete straightened, looking down at her gloves as if she needed to fix them. Her expression was tight, like she was holding back a reply. She bent and reclipped her bindings, her dark curls barely peeking out from the bottom of her helmet.

“How’d you even find us?” Danica attempted a graceful redirection away from her annoyed tone while also ungracefully rolling onto her belly and letting her skis fall to either side of her body, their tips facing up. She pushed herself onto her hands, raising her hips in the air as she shimmied her feet closer together until she felt balanced enough to lean back and stand up. Was it dignified? No. Was it the easiest way she knew how to stand up in skis? Yes. She wasn’t taking any chances of falling in front of Pete again.

Pete fucking Pancott. Danica hated how she had instantly turned into a mood swinging, clumsy mess around the woman. Pete was an ex she hadn’t seen in fifteen years, but those fifteen years made the present moment feel even more odd — she didn’t entirely know where she stood with Pete, or if Pete was just going to pretend they didn’t have a history together. The most irritating part of being around Pete was how attracted Danica still was, which made her feel stupid. Now, her one chance to look polished and put together, she was tripping and short-tempered and awkwardly trying to stand up with two waxed sleds tied to each foot. It wasn’t a recipe for dignified sex appeal, that was for sure. The snow crunched under her skis as she stepped sideways to grab her poles.

“That was like watching a baby giraffe take its first steps,” Izzy piped up while laughing, and Danica was grateful that her goggles concealed her disdain.

“Maggie shared her location in the group chat,” Pete said with a shrug. “We were on See Forever and thought we’d stop seeing forever and instead see if anyone wants to take a break and grab food, though not necessarily in that order.”

That sounded heavenly, and Danica glanced toward Kiera and Maggie. “Do you want to take a lunch break?”

Maggie nodded immediately, and Kiera watched her, as if waiting to follow Danica’s lead.

“Did you want to stay around the slopes or go into town?” Danica asked.

“Probably slopes,” Pete said. “The gondola into town takes forever.”

“Dani, you’d mentioned a place you wanted to try in town, right?” Kiera asked, and Danica could hear the unspoken way Kiera was offering Danica an excuse to spend some more time away from Pete if she needed. Danica tallied it as reason number 483 why Kiera was her favorite person: She’d always been able to read Danica like a book.

She was an idiot when it came to that woman, and she couldn’t trust herself. As soon as she’d seen Pete the day before, a wave of emotions and attraction and memories flooded her senses. Even now, she realized with dismay that the familiar butterflies of excitement appeared when Pete was nearby.

A half hour later, she and Kiera had ditched their gear at the condo, jumped on the gondola into town, and were walking along one of the main streets of downtown, a charming strip of brick buildings with shops and food that blended small town with luxury resort. Ahead of them, the San Juan mountains were white tipped, their steep peaks reaching up toward the bright blue sky.

“So, want to talk about your little episode on the mountain?” Kiera asked as they walked through the door of a brewpub. Danica had lived in Denver long enough to know you couldn’t throw a stone in a Colorado mountain town without hitting a brewpub. Most had good beer but extremely average food. The ambiance of this particular establishment was rustic, with long wooden tables and wood paneled walls. Ancient skis and snowshoes hung above black and white photos of people skiing or hiking in what looked like the 1940s. Like most brewpubs, it smelled like yeast and fried foods, and the table was only slightly sticky in places.

“Episode? When I fell?” Danica asked, unwinding her scarf and taking off her beanie, running her hands through her hair to revive her hat-flattened locks. The bangs were new and she wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about them yet. She checked her phone to read a text from her favorite colleague, saying that the baby she’d been texting about the day before was still strong and stable. Even hundreds of miles away, she’d never learned to stop worrying about her patients.

“No, when you yelled at Pete for helping you,” Kiera clarified, giving her a pointed look that could only come from years of practice as a mother and a middle school teacher.

Danica locked her phone, stifling her grimace at the photo of Eddie she’d put there to keep up appearances. She turned to Kiera, focusing solely on her friend. “I just told her I didn’t need help.”

Kiera’s expression was one of skepticism and what Danica noted was just the tiniest smirk.

Danica lifted her chin in defiance. It’s so awkward when someone tries to help you stand back up on skis. I would have just taken us both down.” Danica adjusted her coat on the back of the chair, then tugged at the sleeves of her base layer shirt.

A server appeared to take their order, and disappeared just as quickly. Danica sipped water out of a red plastic cup that had seen better days. She missed plastic straws. Paper straws were a travesty. In the age of space travel and the Large Hadron Collider, why couldn’t someone invent a straw that didn’t instantly dissolve on your lips, kill sea turtles, or need to be toted around in your purse? Thankfully, the server’s return with their beers saved her from further straw grief.

“So, what’s really up? You seem off,” Kiera said, wiping at the corner of her mouth after taking a large sip of her cloudy beer.

Danica gulped at her own beer, a smooth golden ale. “Isn’t it weird that Pete is here after just being absent for fifteen years? No one’s even mad that she just hasn’t talked to any of us except for Izzy in fifteen years?”

“Yeah,” Kiera admitted. “I guess that’s a little weird.” She raised an eyebrow at Danica.

“I mean, even Izzy comments on my social media posts or sends me a Happy Birthday text. Pete just disappeared and then shows up and acts like we’re just as close as we had been.”

Kiera made a noise of agreement, thoughtfully looking down into her beer.

“She doesn’t even seem to have changed at all,” Danica said quickly. Only with Kiera could she be so honest. “She’s still impulsive and just doing whatever she likes and acting like those of us with careers have sold out to… the man or something.”

Kiera snorted. “Damn the man.”

“Hell yeah, except the man signs my checks that pay my mortgage so like, yeah, sure, if that’s selling out, then consider me sold.”

Kiera looked amused and concerned at the same time. “Wow. You’re really riled up.”

Danica laughed self-consciously. Kiera wasn’t wrong. Her heart was pounding and she felt a rush of adrenaline from her complaints. “Have you talked to her at all in the last… well, since college and not told me?”

“Uh, no, I was obviously Team Danica in the pseudo-breakup.”

“God, I love you,” Danica said, grinning. “She does seem like she’s happy, though. Annoyingly.”

“I’m honestly jealous she gets to travel so much. Wouldn’t you, if you had the chance?” Kiera asked.

Danica shrugged. Most days she preferred her couch and her favorite throw blanket and a cup of tea or wine. “It seems exhausting.”

“Nothing can be more exhausting than teaching cells and biodiversity to 85 pubescent middle schoolers all day,” Kiera said with a tired grin.

Danica groaned. “Yeah, that does sound… rough.” She tipped her glass in acknowledgement. “Major props to you for sticking with that, especially after Covid. No, thank you.”

“It has its moments. I’m glad to have work. I can’t imagine how Maggie is a stay-at-home mom. I feel like my brain would just melt,” Kiera admitted.

Danica raised her eyebrows. “Same, but she seems happy, too.”

“Everyone does seem that way, I think,” Kiera said, her expression unreadable.

Danica nodded slowly, feeling like she might be the only one who wasn’t. Just another reason to not tell Kiera about her breakup with Eddie, she supposed. Honestly, it surprised her that Kiera hadn’t already sussed it out. Maybe being around Pete had frazzled Danica so much that Kiera couldn’t see beyond her immediate distress. She cleared her throat, shifting the subject just slightly away from herself. “What’s new with the girls? Did Lizzie decide what her science fair project is going to be or is she still overthinking it?”

They talked about Kiera’s daughters, two perfect little hellions who Danica adored. They were tiny Kiera clones in every way, from their round faces and dark hair to their snark. Although Danica found that fact perfectly delightful, Kiera found it endlessly annoying.

They finished their meals in better spirits, laughing as they shared stories about work and kids and life while Danica avoided talking about her own relationship. Still, something in the back of Danica’s mind knew that the conversation about Pete wasn’t over. Kiera had never let her off the hook so easily before, and she doubted that would start now.