Chapter 20
twenty
Tilly had not moved from the rug. That was the first thing Rainey registered — the dog’s warm weight against the side of the bed, her slow breathing, the way she lifted her head the moment Rainey stirred.
The room came back in pieces. The quilt.
The window throwing pale Montana morning across the floor.
Somewhere outside, men’s voices, a door, a horse moving in a paddock.
She lay still and let it settle over her: she was at Valor Ridge.
She was alive. Evander was somewhere in this building, and she had fallen asleep before she could go to him.
She was still wearing one boot.
She got the other one off before the knock came.
Nessie arrived first, carrying coffee in a mug that said World’s Okayest Baker in chipped blue letters and a stack of folded clothes draped over one arm.
She set both on the dresser without ceremony, took one look at Rainey’s face, and said, “Shower first. Questions whenever you’re ready, or never. Whichever.”
She left the coffee and went.
Rainey sat with it for a minute, both hands around the mug.
The coffee was extraordinary — dark and clean, nothing like the camp-brewed stuff she’d been living on for a week — and she stared at the wall and drank it slowly and let herself have this one quiet thing before the morning got complicated.
It got complicated fast.
Maggie arrived next with a paper bag that smelled of cinnamon and a guitar case she set carefully in the corner like she already knew it was sacred ground.
Rainey stared at the case. She recognized it.
Her old Taylor, the one she’d left in the trunk of her car before any of this started, before the Dead Marshall, before Evander.
“Someone grabbed it from your car after they found it parked at the trailhead,” Maggie said. “Figured you’d want it close.”
“Thank you.” Rainey touched the case’s worn handle. She didn’t open it.
Not yet. There was too much packed into that guitar right now and she couldn’t afford to open it the way she couldn’t afford to open a pressure vessel — it would all come out at once and she wasn’t ready.
She left it in the corner and stepped into the shower.
By the time she came out, the room had acquired two more women and a second cup of coffee.
Naomi Lefthand sat in the chair by the window reading something on her phone, unhurried, as if she’d simply decided this was where she’d spend her morning.
Mariah Duval stood at the dresser sorting through what appeared to be a curated stack of clothing, her dark red hair swept into a neat twist, her posture that of a woman who did everything at the same impeccable standard.
“These should fit,” Mariah said without turning around. “The jeans are a half size up because I assumed you’d want room to breathe after a week on a mountain.”
Rainey looked at the clothes. Soft flannel shirt, dark jeans, a simple gray pullover. All clean. All real, not borrowed from a dead man’s closet, and the normality of it was almost too much.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice came out rough.
Mariah glanced over her shoulder. Whatever she saw in Rainey’s face made her turn fully around, and she held Rainey’s gaze just long enough to make the acknowledgment land. Then she went back to the dresser. “There are toiletries in the bathroom. Greta brought extras.”
As if on cue, Greta appeared in the doorway with her arms full — a toiletry bag, a pair of clean socks, and a dog biscuit she held out to Tilly with the confidence of a woman who understood dogs better than most people. Tilly took it with a delicacy that seemed entirely out of character.
“Didn’t want to show up empty-handed,” Greta said.
The morning unspooled from there. Nessie came back with food — the cinnamon rolls from Maggie’s bag, eggs from the kitchen, more coffee.
They arranged themselves in the room with the easy, unself-conscious comfort of women who knew each other well and had collectively decided to extend that comfort to a stranger without making a production of it.
No one asked Rainey to talk about the mountain.
No one asked about Evander, not directly.
They just occupied the space around her, warm and solid, and let her sit in the middle of it.
Tilly stayed at Rainey’s feet through all of it. When the room got loud — Greta and Maggie arguing amiably about some trail route, Nessie talking about whether the cake had survived last night’s chaos — Rainey dropped a hand to the dog’s neck and felt her settle.
Evander. Present through the dog, through the borrowed flannel she’d folded into the pack, through the muscle memory of reaching sideways in the dark and finding him there.
She hadn’t gone to see him.
She told herself it was because she’d been asleep before she could. She told herself it was because Bear was with him, because he needed to rest, because she’d only be in the way. She sat with Tilly’s weight against her leg and let herself believe all of it.
Nessie sat down beside her on the bed, close but not crowding, and said in that warm, no-nonsense voice, “You holding up?”
“Mostly.”
“River means well.”
“I know.”
“But.”
Rainey exhaled slowly through her nose. “Eight years is a long time. I can’t just— one hug doesn’t fix what eight years did to me. Does that make me—”
“No,” Nessie said.
“I haven’t finished the sentence.”
“Doesn’t matter what’s at the end of it.
No.” She picked at a thread on her sleeve.
“When Jax and I first got together, I spent three months waiting for him to be a lie. He’d done everything right.
He kept showing up, patient as anything, and I kept bracing for the part where he turned out to be what I was afraid of.
” She paused. “Trust doesn’t rebuild because someone wants it to.
It rebuilds because time passes without another betrayal.
River wanting to fix it tonight doesn’t mean you have to let him. ”
Rainey stared at the guitar case in the corner. “I don’t know where to start with him.”
“You don’t have to know yet. You just survived something. Give yourself a day before you start rebuilding the rest of your life.”
Gemma arrived mid-morning with a basket of toiletries she’d apparently assembled from various women around the ranch and set on the dresser beside Mariah’s clothes.
She had an easy, warm energy — the kind that filled a room without demanding anything from it — and she settled herself on the chair Naomi had vacated with a cup of coffee and an uncomplicated smile.
“He talked about you constantly,” Gemma said. “River. From almost the day I arrived here. I knew your name before I knew half the people on this ranch.”
Rainey looked at her. “What did he say?”
“That you were tough. That you could play guitar well enough to make people cry. That he regretted leaving you behind every single day and didn’t know how to say it.” She tilted her cup toward the window. “He’s not good at saying things directly. I’ve noticed.”
“He never was.”
“He lights up when he talks about you.” Gemma’s voice was easy and genuine. “I thought you should know. Whatever complicated thing exists between you two — he’s not pretending it doesn’t matter. He’s just afraid you won’t forgive him.”
Rainey turned that over. She watched Gemma’s face and found nothing but honesty there. She looked good with River. Not just aesthetically — there was a steadiness in how she talked about him that made Rainey believe she actually saw him. All of him, the funny and the fractured both.
River deserved to be seen like that.
The ugly twist she’d felt last night looking at them loosened slightly. Not gone. But loosened.
“Does he know you came in here and pitched him?” Rainey asked.
Gemma laughed. “God, no. He’d die.”
Greta was leaning against the windowsill with her coffee, half-listening, and she caught Rainey’s eye and offered a small, sideways smile.
“He told me about you,” Rainey said to her. “Evander. At the cabin. He mentioned you’d been on backcountry trips together.”
“Eight years’ worth.” Greta looked out the window. “He’s the only person I know who actually understands the silence out there. Most people get uncomfortable with it. Evander treats it like furniture.” A beat. “We’ve never been anything except friends, by the way. If you were wondering.”
Rainey hadn’t said she was wondering.
“I wasn’t—”
“You were.” Greta turned back from the window and her expression was too sharp and too kind at the same time. “It’s fine. He matters to you. You’d want to know.”
The relief came so fast it was embarrassing. Rainey looked down at her coffee and felt heat crawl up the back of her neck. Eight days on a mountain with this man, and apparently what she’d been quietly, unreasonably jealous of was a wilderness guide with a compass tattoo and good spatial awareness.
She hadn’t even admitted to herself she was jealous until now.
“He mentioned you a lot,” Rainey said. “For a man who doesn’t talk, he mentioned you a lot.”
Greta smiled at that, and it reached her eyes. “He doesn’t have many people. The ones he has, he holds onto.” She pushed off the windowsill. “Don’t let him run, okay? He’ll try. It’s basically his primary hobby at this point.”
Brandt knocked at eleven.
The women cleared out with minimal ceremony.
Nessie collected the mugs and the empty plates.
Mariah folded the leftover clothes. Gemma gathered the toiletry basket.
Maggie squeezed Rainey’s shoulder on the way out, brief and warm, nothing required in return.
Greta paused in the doorway and gave Rainey a look that said you’ve got this, without the words.
Naomi stayed. Rainey hadn’t asked out loud, but she’d looked at her, and Naomi had nodded and pulled the chair back to the corner and settled into it with her phone down and her attention up.