17. Kinsley #3
"Jakob."
He looks at me from the fire where he's crouched, feeding a split log into the iron mouth of the woodstove. The flames catch his face in angles of orange and shadow, the scar through his eyebrow a bright white line.
"What if we built something here?"
His expression doesn't change. He slots the log into the fire and closes the iron door and wipes his palms on his thighs, and the motion is so unhurried, so fundamentally unbothered by the concept of urgency, that I almost lose my nerve.
Almost. But the idea is already in my teeth and I can't spit it out fast enough.
"Not like a hotel. Not like the glamping disaster I was trying to find when I drove my car into a river.
Something real. A wilderness survival retreat.
High-end, small-scale, maybe four or five guests at a time, maximum.
People who actually want to learn how to live out here.
How to start a fire, how to read animal tracks, how to purify water, how to, I don't know, not die. "
I'm off the bed now, pacing the cabin in his oversized henley that hits me at mid-thigh, my bare feet on the rough-hewn planks, my hands moving in the air the way they used to move during pitch meetings when I could feel the client leaning in.
"I know how to plan events. I know how to market to high-net-worth clients.
I know how to build a brand that makes people feel like they're getting an exclusive experience, because that's literally all I did at Whitfield and Associates except instead of selling corporate retreats I was selling mergers.
The skill set is the same. Package something inaccessible, make it aspirational, charge accordingly. "
I stop pacing and face him. He's still crouched by the fire, one arm resting on his knee, his bandaged forearm catching the light. His green eyes haven't left me. I can't read them.
"You have eighty acres. You have skills that people in cities would pay thousands of dollars to learn for a single weekend.
You have a location that's so remote it's practically a selling point in itself.
No WiFi, no cell service, no connection to anything except the mountain.
Do you know what stressed-out executives pay for digital detox retreats?
I've seen the invoices, Jakob. It's obscene.
And those retreats are held in converted barns in Vermont with cucumber water and guided meditation.
You have actual wilderness. Actual danger.
Actual isolation that would take their breath away, not some manufactured rustic aesthetic with a barista on staff. "
"I handle everything on the business side.
Bookings, marketing, logistics, client communications.
All the noise. All the people stuff. None of it touches you unless you want it to.
You do what you do. You teach. You guide.
You keep people alive in the woods the way you kept me alive.
And we set the schedule together. Four retreats a year, maybe five.
Off-season, this place is ours. Quiet. Private. Exactly the way you need it."
I swallow. My throat is dry. The fire shifts and the light moves across his face and he hasn't moved from his crouch by the stove and his expression is granite and glass and I cannot read it. I press on because stopping now would be worse than saying too much.
"It lets me contribute. It gives me purpose that doesn't belong to someone else.
And it means I'm not just hiding up here, Jakob.
I'm building something. With you. On your land, on your terms, in a way that doesn't require either of us to be anything we're not.
You stay on the mountain. I stay on the mountain.
And we make this place work for both of us instead of just being a bunker you're surviving in. "
I run out of words. The silence that follows is absolute, the kind of silence that only exists above seven thousand feet, where there's nothing between you and the sky to absorb the sound of your own heartbeat.
The fire crackles once and then even the fire goes quiet, as if the cabin itself is holding its breath.
Jakob stares at me. His jaw is tight, the muscles in his cheeks drawn flat beneath the dark beard, and his eyes are fixed on mine with an intensity that pins me to the floorboards. He doesn't blink. Doesn't shift his weight. Doesn't open his mouth.
Ten seconds pass.
Twenty.
I feel the blood drain from my face. My hands, still suspended in mid-gesture, lower to my sides.
The pitch-meeting confidence evaporates like breath in cold air and underneath it is just me, barefoot and bare-legged in a dead man's shirt, standing in front of a man whose solitude is sacred, whose eighty acres are the walls he built around the wound of being the only one who survived, and I just suggested we open the gates and let strangers in.
Twenty-five seconds.
His jaw works. A single, slow clench.
Thirty seconds of perfect, devastating silence, and I cannot breathe.