Page 10 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Mountain Man

Drive safe.

Five thousand kilometers.

Chioma thinks I've lost my mind. She said so from her couch at 11pm while I threw clothes into a bag, my hands moving faster than my thoughts. "You're driving to British Columbia in the middle of the night to meet a man you've never FaceTimed? A man who could be anyone?"

"He's not anyone."

"Mara. Baby. I love you. But this is insane."

"Probably."

"At least FaceTime him first."

"No."

"Why?"

Because a FaceTime call is safe. A FaceTime call is a controlled environment, good lighting, careful angles, a version of myself I can curate. And I'm done with curated versions. Done with blowouts Tunde preferred and dresses his mother picked and the careful, contained, palatable version of Imara Adekunle that everyone keeps trying to build.

Whatever happens when I see Holden Briggs, it's going to be real. Messy and honest and terrifying and real.

"Because some things you can't say through a screen." I zip the bag. Kiss Chioma on the forehead. She's crying. Mango is chewing a sock. "I'll call you from the road."

The drive takes three days.

Through the flat dark sprawl of Ontario overnight, coffee at a gas station in Sudbury at 4am where the attendant looks at my packed car and says "Running to or from?" and I say "Both" because that's the honest answer. Through northern Ontario as the sun comes up, endless boreal forest, rock cuts, lakes that flash silver between the trees. My phone mounted on the dash playing Burna Boy, then Wizkid, then Sade when the adrenaline wears off somewhere past Sault Ste. Marie.

Sleep in Thunder Bay. Four hours in a motel that smells like carpet cleaner. Then Saskatchewan's flat golden nothing fora full day, fields stretching in every direction until the horizon feels like a dare. Sleep again in Medicine Hat because my hands are shaking on the wheel. Through the Alberta foothills where the mountains start appearing, faint blue shapes that grow into something enormous the closer I get.

Five thousand kilometers. Five provinces. Three days of highway, gas station coffee, and my best friend calling every few hours to make sure I haven't lost my mind.My sister Nkechi texts three praying hands emojis and a you're my hero. My mother doesn't call. Doesn't know I've left.

Crossing into British Columbia, the landscape changes so dramatically it hurts. Mountains everywhere. Rivers cutting through valleys. Pine forests so thick and dark they look black from the highway. The air through my cracked window smells like cold water.

Crimson Hollow doesn't appear all at once. The highway narrows. The GPS takes me off a main road onto a two lane stretch through a valley. Then a hand painted sign. CRIMSON HOLLOW, POP. 2,500, EST. 1890s. A main street with storefronts. A café with warm light in the windows. Bean & Bloom. It's real. This place I've been Googling at 2am for weeks, imagining while I poured candles, building in my head while a stranger on the other end of my phone described what the mountains sound like when the wind shifts.

Real.

Past the town. Twenty minutes. Logging road. Gravel rattling under my tires. Pine trees closing in. My heart is beating so fast my vision keeps narrowing at the edges. The road dead ends at a clearing.

A cabin. Log. One story. Porch with a rocking chair. Woodpile against the south wall. Exactly as he described.

And a man standing on that porch.

Tall. Broad. Blond hair going silver, too long. Full beard with copper in it. Flannel rolled to the elbows over forearms thick with muscle. Hands hanging at his sides. Ice blue eyes that I can see from thirty feet away because they're locked on my car like he's been watching this road for weeks.

He has. He told me.

He's been listening for me.

My engine dies. The mountain silence rushes in. No traffic, no sirens, no city sounds. Just wind in the pines, a creek somewhere nearby, my own blood roaring in my ears.

For ten seconds, we just look at each other.

Everything I imagined, every late night fantasy built on short texts and brutal honesty, all of it crumbles because the real thing is so much more than I prepared for. He looks exactly like his words. Blunt. Weathered. Serious. Beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with prettiness and everything to do with presence.

Then his mouth does something. Not a smile. A movement. A shift in the hard line of his jaw. Like something locked inside him just loosened.

My hands find the door handle. My legs find the ground. Gravel under my sneakers. Cool mountain air on my bare arms. The garage in Scarborough is five thousand kilometers behind me, my mother's dining room and Tunde's ring and every version of myself I built for someone else.