Walk With Me

Chapter One

Half a Heartbeat

I didn’t fall in love in Rome.

I didn’t fall in love in Paris either, though that would make for a cleaner story — something easier to explain when people ask where it began.

I fell in love in a hallway in Salt Lake City.

And I didn’t even know your name.

It started a month before the plane ever left the ground, in a classroom at the end of an ordinary school day — the kind where everything feels slow and stale and predictable, where you’re half-asleep even though sunlight is slanting through the windows and turning the floating dust into something almost beautiful.

The room buzzed with late-afternoon restlessness. A kid in the back tapped a pencil in a rhythm that matched the ticking clock. Someone whispered a joke that rippled forward in quiet laughter. Someone else kept closing a notebook one inch at a time, testing how far they could get before the teacher noticed. You could feel the whole class leaning toward freedom.

Then the door opened.

Our school counselor stepped inside holding a stack of brochures — glossy ones, the kind with bright photos and bold fonts and too many exclamation points. She rested them on the teacher’s desk and cleared her throat like she was about to offer something important.

“Before you go,” she said, “if anyone’s interested in a four-week travel-study program — we’re offering one this summer.”

A few students perked up. Most didn’t.

“Rome. Florence. Venice. Paris. London.”

The words drifted out casually, like she wasn’t naming entire worlds.

They didn’t feel like real places. They felt like vocabulary words from history class — black-and-white photographs in a textbook, something other people saw.

But something in me shifted. Not dramatically, not like a struck match. Just a small click somewhere behind the ribs, the sound of a thing settling into the slot it was always meant for.

After class, people filed out fast. A couple of kids grabbed brochures to impress their parents later. Most walked past without looking.

I slowed.

The counselor noticed. “Take one,” she said.

I picked one up, the paper cool and smooth against my fingers. I didn’t know then why I took it.

I know now.

I walked home in that golden late-afternoon light that makes everything feel slightly unreal around the edges. Kids rode bikes on the sidewalk. Sprinklers arced across the lawns, catching the sun in brief rainbows. A dog barked somewhere a few streets over.

Salt Lake felt small that evening. Safe. The size of a thing you could hold in one hand.

At a stoplight I pulled the brochure from my backpack and flipped it open. The Colosseum. The Eiffel Tower. Bridges glowing over black water. Students laughing in front of cathedrals older than our whole country.

It looked like another life.

At home, I set the brochure on my desk and tried to ignore it.

My dad sat in the living room reading the paper, the television on low for company. The house always felt steady around him — quiet in a way that wasn’t empty, just settled.

I stood in the doorway longer than I needed to.

“What’s that?” he asked without looking up.

“School trip thing.”

I handed it to him. He read slowly. He always read slowly, like words deserved the time.

“Europe,” he said finally.

When he was twenty he’d been a pilot stationed in England during the war. I didn’t know much more than that. He never told me the stories directly — but sometimes, when other adults were over and the evening stretched late, I’d catch his voice drifting from the living room. Names of cities. Altitudes. Weather. Loss.

He never told those stories to me.

He just held the brochure.

“Rome,” he said quietly.

The word sounded different in his voice. Heavier. Like a place he’d left something in.

“You want to go?” he asked.

The question felt larger than it should have. I thought about the bridges, the stone streets. But mostly I thought about something I couldn’t yet name.

“I think so,” I said.

He folded the brochure once. “If you’re going to go,” he said, looking at me, “go.”

That was it. No warning. No advice. Just permission.

I went back to my room and closed the door. I didn’t tell him the real reason I suddenly cared about Europe.

I didn’t understand it yet myself.

The informational meeting was the next evening, in the church annex classroom on 700 East. I arrived early and pretended it was an accident.

Rows of folding chairs stood in uneven lines. The fluorescent lights hummed. The carpet smelled faintly of cleaner and old hymnbooks.

Students trickled in.

I tried not to scan the room.

I scanned the room.

And then I saw you.

You were sitting three rows ahead, near the center. Your posture wasn’t stiff or self-conscious — it was steady, present, the posture of someone who belonged wherever she happened to be.

You turned your head.

And you were already looking at me.

For years I told myself we looked up at the same moment. That isn’t true. You were half a heartbeat ahead.

You gave the smallest sideways smile — not wide, not practiced. The kind that flickers and then settles. Not flirtatious. Not bold. Just curious, like I was a sentence you’d decided to finish reading.

I didn’t know what I was seeing. I only knew I didn’t want the moment to end.

The counselor started in on deadlines and itineraries and safety protocols. I heard almost none of it. I was watching you lean forward when she said Paris, watching you tuck a strand of hair behind your ear when you were thinking, watching your pen move fast and sure across the page while the rest of us sat still.

You looked like you were already there.

I felt like I’d wandered in by accident.

When the meeting ended, the chairs scraped against the floor and students gathered in clumps and parents filtered in. You stood, slung your bag over your shoulder, and disappeared into the hallway before I found the nerve to move.

I didn’t follow. I didn’t speak. I didn’t even know your name.

But something had started.

Two days later, during lunch, the hallway was chaos — lockers slamming, somebody bouncing a basketball where they weren’t supposed to, laughter ricocheting off the tile.

I was thinking about the brochure again. I don’t know why it kept finding its way back into my thoughts. Maybe because it was the only thing that felt like it pointed somewhere.

I turned a corner too quickly.

You turned at the exact same second.

We collided. Your books spilled across the linoleum, sliding off in three directions.

“Oh — I’m sorry,” I said, already dropping to my knees.

“It’s okay.” You were almost laughing. “I didn’t see you.”

For the first time I heard your voice up close. Soft. Careful, like each word had been chosen a half-second before you said it.

We both reached for the same notebook. It had fallen open to a page that wasn’t school notes — words arranged in a shape that wasn’t quite prose and wasn’t quite a list. I didn’t read it. But I noticed it.

Our fingers touched.

It wasn’t dramatic. No music. No gasp. Just a quiet, absolute sense of something inside me sliding into place.

You looked up. You did that thing I didn’t have a name for yet — tilted your head slightly, just enough, like you were reading something in my face I hadn’t said out loud. Your eyes held mine a second longer than they needed to. That same half-smile.

Then you closed the notebook.

“I’ll see you,” you said, gathering the last of your books.

Not see you later. Not see you around.

Just — I’ll see you.

You walked away into the current of students. I stayed where I was longer than I should have.

That night I opened the brochure again. The cities didn’t read as abstractions anymore — not stops on someone else’s itinerary, but the next thing, the place the hallway had been quietly pointing toward all along.

And I knew — with the quiet certainty only the very young are capable of — that if I didn’t go on that trip, I’d regret it the rest of my life.

I was going to Europe.

And I still didn’t know your name.