Falling for Hope by Natalie Vivien

Visiting Hope
     
     
    It had been almost six months, to
the day, since Melissa died.   Amy
gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, pressing her foot harder on the
gas pedal as she swallowed, tried to blink back tears.  
    She hadn’t realized it was the
anniversary of her death.   She should
have.  
    Outside the car, the dark pines
kept rolling past as the gravel track angled higher and higher into the
mountains.   Amy remembered the first
time Hope and Melissa had invited her to their “summer party.”   She’d had no idea what she was getting into,
ascending that dangerous gravel “road” to the beautiful vacation cabin Hope and
Melissa shared with each other, and—each summer—a handful of their nearest and
dearest friends.
    Amy had first met Hope at her job
at the vet’s office.   Hope brought in a
cat that had been hit by a car, the orange fur on the near-death feline matted
with blood.   Amy had just started
working there, had just moved to town for the job, and Hope was an as-yet
unfamiliar face.   The short-haired,
stocky woman with the quick smile handed Amy the unconscious cat.   Surprisingly, Amy had been able to save the
cat, and she was shocked when she came out to the waiting room to tell the
patient’s owner just this fact—and Hope declared the cat was a stray.  
    “All animals have a right to be
taken care of,” said Hope easily as she took out her wallet from her back
pocket.   She flashed Amy a wide,
handsome smile, and Amy’s heart had raced.  
    It seemed that almost every day,
Hope was in the vet’s office with one of her animals, or a stray that needed
help.   Amy was getting accustomed to
seeing the attractive woman in the waiting room holding a cat or dog or,
occasionally, goat.   Amy liked Hope’s
fast smile, how gentle she was with the animals, and Hope could always tell a
joke that would get Amy laughing.   Amy
was just summoning up the courage to ask Hope out on a date when, one Friday
evening, Hope asked her to come out to the summer party.   She said our summer party.   Not my .
    When Amy pressed for a little more
information, Hope said with her effortless smile, “It’s at my and Melissa’s
cottage, in the mountains.”
    Of course.   Amy shouldn’t have expected that a woman
like Hope would be single.   But she had
been, well, hoping.
    Still, she didn’t have many friends
in town yet, so she’d readily agreed.  
    Here and now, five years later, Amy
came out of the thick, dense trees and parked her Mini Cooper on the gravel lot
between Chris’s gigantic blue truck and Aspen’s bucket of rusted bolts that had
been, once, a car.   Amy switched off the
ignition, reached behind her for her overnight pack and got out of the Cooper,
pausing with her hand on the car door and inhaling deeply the scent of pine,
loam, moss, rotting leaves and—somewhere—perfect wildflowers.   Amy stood for a long moment, her fingers
gripping the edge of the door and car window, the pack weighing heavily on her
shoulder, as she remembered last year at this time, Hope and Melissa and the
other women gathered around the bonfire behind the cabin, laughing over some
ridiculous joke Chris had made, burning the roofs of their mouths on s’mores
and thinking that summer would never end.   But it had ended, and then Melissa had gotten into the car accident,
driving up the mountain in the snow.
    And Melissa had died.
    Amy was aware that life was finite
and precious—she knew that fact intimately, working with animals every day,
whose fragile lives she could sometimes piece back together—and sometimes could
not.   But she’d known Hope and Melissa
for five years; they’d been the first friends she’d encountered here, in her
new life, and Melissa was the first of Amy’s friends to ever pass away.   And so suddenly.  
    Amy could just see the lights from
the large cabin peeking out from the trees further up the mountain.   Everyone was already here, she saw,