A Greater Love
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 15
She planned the hike.
Not in response to a suggestion from Jack, not as the next item on an unspoken list. She’d spent two evenings in February researching trails on her phone, reading elevation profiles and reviews, assessing distances against what she knew about her own endurance. She’d chosen one in the hills above Crystal Springs — longer than the first hike, more elevation, a summit with a clear view of the bay — and she’d texted Jack on a Thursday.
Saturday. There’s a trail I want to do. Can you drive?
He’d replied: What time?
Eight o’clock.
I’ll be there.
She’d put her phone down and sat with the particular feeling of having initiated something, which was still new enough to be noticeable. Not uncomfortable. Just new.
He picked her up at seven fifty-five. She was at the curb with a daypack — water, snacks, a light jacket — that she’d packed herself the night before.
In the car she gave him the trail head address without being asked. He entered it into the navigation and drove.
They talked on the way up into the hills the way they’d been talking for months — easily, with the particular quality of two people who have spent enough time together that conversation doesn’t need to be constructed. She told him about a book she’d finished. He told her about a problem in AP Physics that had been bothering him for three days. She asked a question about it that he couldn’t immediately answer, which she found satisfying in the particular way she’d come to find satisfaction in things that required thought.
At the trail head she got out and looked at the path going up into the hills and felt the February air on her face.
“Lead,” Jack said.
She already was.
The trail climbed steadily for the first mile, rising through chaparral and scrub oak, the bay appearing and disappearing through gaps in the vegetation as they gained elevation. Étain set a pace that was deliberate and sustainable. She’d thought about the pacing, too.
She didn’t look back.
The second mile steepened. The path narrowed in places, the footing requiring attention, and she gave it her full attention and moved through it cleanly. At one point a section of loose rock crossed the trail and she navigated it without pausing, choosing her steps with the particular confidence of someone who has learned to trust her own judgment on uncertain ground.
Jack came through behind her without comment.
By the third mile she could feel the elevation in her legs and her breathing, and she adjusted her pace and kept going. The summit was visible above them now — a rounded ridge with the sky behind it, the bay just becoming visible beyond, flat and silver in the February light.
She thought about a nurse’s office in October. A girl who had gone somewhere inside herself because the world had become unmanageable. The way she’d followed the first moving thing up the stairs and locked onto it because it was solid and she was not.
She thought about making toast on a Saturday morning.
She thought about Gerald knocking a glass of water off the counter and looking shocked by the consequences.
She reached the summit and stopped.
The view was what the reviews had promised. The bay stretched south from the ridge, silver-grey in the morning light, the hills on the far shore visible in the clear February air. The city was somewhere to the north. Down the slope behind them the trail wound back through the chaparral to the parking lot where Jack’s car sat in the morning sun.
Jack came up beside her. They stood at the top of the ridge and looked at the bay and neither of them said anything for a moment.
It was very quiet up there. Wind, and the distant sound of a hawk somewhere below the ridge, and the particular silence of a high place.
Étain looked at the view for a long moment. Then she turned to him.
“I want to be yours,” she said.
She said it the way she’d known she would say it — simply, without preamble, looking directly at him. Not a question. Not a plea. Not the desperate clinging of the stairwell or the careful testing of the nurse’s office. Just a true thing, said.
Jack looked at her.
He didn’t respond immediately. The wind moved through the chaparral below them. The hawk called once, far away. He held her gaze with the complete, unhurried attention that she’d been watching him give to things that mattered since the first day he’d come down those stairs.
Then he asked the question.
“Are you sure that’s a choice?” he said. “Or is it a need?”
She’d expected the question. Not because she’d been told to expect it, but because she knew him well enough by now to know how he thought. She’d been preparing her answer since Saturday morning in her kitchen, since the phone call with Dr. Reid, since Monday at the homeroom door when she’d looked at him and known the moment was coming.