17. Kinsley
KINSLEY
Ican't stop scrolling.
Each voicemail lands like a fist to the solar plexus, and my body remembers everything my mind spent the last week trying to forget.
The fluorescent hum of the open-plan office at eleven p.m. The way David would stand behind my chair and read my emails over my shoulder, his cologne suffocating, his hand resting on the back of my neck like he owned the vertebrae underneath.
The panic attacks in the bathroom stall that I timed to exactly four minutes because that's how long I could be gone before he noticed.The "fast-track promotion" I wore like a shackle because saying yes to your boss is easier than saying no when he controls your entire professional existence.
David fills the cabin on the sixth message and the words hit the log walls and contaminate everything they touch. His tone has shifted from threats to something worse. Concern. Manufactured, surgical concern, the kind he'd deploy in client meetings when he wanted to appear human.
"Kins, baby, I'm worried about you. Your mother called me. She's worried too. We all just want to know you're safe. You don't have to come back to the firm. Just come home. We can talk about this. I miss you."
My stomach turns. He called my mother. Of course he called my mother.
He'd have charmed her within thirty seconds, that warm baritone asking if she'd heard from her daughter, planting the seed that I'd had some kind of breakdown, that he was the stable one, the reasonable one, the one picking up the pieces of my scattered little life.
My mother would have eaten it alive. She always loved David.
She loved the firm. She loved telling her friends at book club that her daughter was the youngest senior coordinator at Whitfield & Associates.
The seventh voicemail starts and his he drops lower, quieter, and I know this register. This is the one he used behind closed doors.
"You're embarrassing yourself. Everyone knows.
The whole floor knows you ran off to play campfire girl because you couldn't handle the Mercer account.
I covered for you. I told them you were on medical leave.
But that buys you maybe another week before HR starts asking questions I can't answer nicely.
Think about what you're doing, Kinsley. Think about what you're throwing away. "
My vision blurs. The tin mug of coffee is still warm in my left hand but I can't feel it.
I can't feel the shirt against my skin or the rough wool blanket under my bare legs.
Everything is David's voice and the fluorescent lights and the sixty-hour weeks and The way he'd grab my elbow in the hallway hard enough to bruise and then buy me an overpriced latte twenty minutes later as if the hostility and the generosity were the same thing, interchangeable currencies in a transaction I never agreed to.
The eighth voicemail begins to play and a massive hand reaches across my field of vision and takes the phone.
Just takes it. Plucks it from my trembling fingers the way someone would remove a knife from a child's grip. Gently, but with absolute finality.
I look up. Jakob stands over me, bare-chested, his bandaged forearm resting at his side, his green eyes locked on the phone screen.
Not anger, exactly. Not the hot, explosive fury from the fight on the mountain or the bear or the men on the road.
Something colder. Something geological in its patience, as if he has all the time in the world to understand exactly what he's hearing before he acts.
He lifts the phone to his ear. David's eighth voicemail plays against his jaw, tiny and tinny in the massive quiet of the building, and Jakob's face as he listens to the full message without blinking.
The fire crackles behind him. A log settles, sending a spray of sparks across the hearth.
His jaw moves once, a single clench of muscle beneath the dark beard, and then the voicemail ends.
His thumb moves across the screen. Three precise taps.
"What are you doing?"
He doesn't answer. He navigates to the call settings with the focused calm of someone field-stripping a weapon and David's number disappears into the blocked contacts list. Gone.
Erased. Walled off from this phone and this cabin and this mountain as thoroughly as the mudslide sealed the road.
Then Jakob closes the voicemail app, clears the notifications, and sets the phone face-down on the nightstand.
He sits on the bed. The mattress dips hard under his weight and I slide toward him involuntarily, my bare knee bumping his hip.
He doesn't look at me right away. He stares at the fire for a long beat, and when he finally turns his head, those green eyes are clear and certain and completely unbothered by the poison that just spewed from that little glass screen.
"That man can't reach you here."
My throat closes. My lips part but nothing comes out because the simple, brutal certainty of him has knocked the air from my lungs.
He's not making a promise. He's not reassuring me.
He is stating a physical fact about the world as it currently exists, the same way he'd tell me the temperature outside or the depth of the snowpack.
David cannot reach me here. The mountain won't allow it.
The mud won't allow it. The man sitting on this bed with his scarred hands and his quiet, devastating permanence will not allow it.
"He'll find another way to contact me. He always does."
Jakob's hand covers my knee. Warm, rough, enormous, his fingers wrapping past the joint entirely, and he squeezes once. Not hard. Just present.
"Let him try."
The silence after his words settles over me like snowfall.
I think about the Mercer account. I think about the four hundred and twelve pages of due diligence I compiled over three sleepless weekends, the color-coded tabs, the footnotes cross-referenced to SEC filings from 2019, the presentation deck I built from scratch because David's associate bungled the formatting and David made me fix it at midnight on a Sunday.
I think about how I hand-delivered that deck to the conference room and David presented it as his own work while I sat in the second row and smiled because that was the deal.
That was always the deal. I do the work.
He takes the name credit. I get to keep my position, my salary, my neat little apartment in Lincoln Park with the built-in bookshelves that I never had time to fill with actual books because I was always at the office.
I think about the bookshelves now. Empty white shelves in an apartment.
I think about the commute on the Brown Line, the crush of bodies at Merchandise Mart, the way the fluorescent lights in the Whitfield & Associates lobby buzzed at a frequency that lived permanently behind my left eye.
I think about the bathroom stall. The four-minute panic attacks.
The way I'd flush the toilet to cover the sound of my own breathing and then walk back to my desk and smile and answer emails and pretend I was a functioning human being who had chosen this life on purpose.
I didn't choose it. Not really. I fell into it the way you fall into quicksand. Gradually, then completely, and by the time you realize you're sinking, the only hand reaching for you belongs to the person who pushed you in.
Jakob's thumb traces a slow circle on my kneecap.
He isn't regarding me. He's mesmerized by the fire, giving me the space to arrive at whatever conclusion I'm arriving at without the pressure of his eyes.
He does that. I've noticed. When something matters, he looks away.
As if he knows that being observed while you're breaking open is worse than breaking open alone.
I look at the phone on the nightstand. Face-down, dark, silent.
A small rectangle of glass and aluminum that contains my entire former life.
Every contact, every calendar invite, every email chain stretching back four years to the day David hired me as a junior associate and told me I was brilliant and that he was going to make me a star.
I was twenty-three. I believed him. I believed him for a long time, even after the believing started tasting like blood from biting my own tongue to keep quiet in meetings where he talked over me.
I reach for the phone. Jakob's hand doesn't tighten on my knee. He doesn't stop me. Doesn't flinch. He just keeps tracing that slow circle, and I pick up the phone and turn it face-up and the screen glows white in the dim cabin.
I open my email. The inbox is a disaster.
Three hundred and forty-seven unread messages, most of them from colleagues I barely know asking if I'm "okay" in that corporate way that really means "are you coming back to do your share of the work.
" A few from HR with ominous subject lines about leave documentation.
One from David, sent an hour ago, with no subject line at all.
I don't open it. I don't need to open it.
I know what it says. Come back. You're nothing without this. You're nothing without me.
I tap compose instead.
The new email sits blank and white and waiting, the cursor blinking against the void of the text field.
I type the address for Margaret Chen in Human Resources, the woman who processed my leave paperwork with pursed lips and a look that said she knew exactly what was happening between me and David and had decided it wasn't her problem. I type a subject line.
Resignation. Effective Immediately.
My fingers hover. The cursor blinks. The fire pops.
Jakob breathes beside me, slow and steady, a metronome of calm.
I glance at the window where dawn is creeping through the gaps in the boards he nailed up against the bear, thin slats of pale gold light falling across the cabin floor in stripes that look like the bars of a cage coming undone.
I type.