Chapter 3 MAYA
MAYA
I wake up on the floor with the fire dead and my breath visible in the grey light.
Not disoriented. Not confused. I know exactly where I am and why I'm here, and that knowledge is already pressing down before my eyes are fully open.
I spent the night as close to the fireplace as I could manage, the cedar chest blankets piled around me in layers that never quite got warm enough.
The armchair is still wedged against the door where I left it at midnight, the back of it jammed under the handle in lieu of a lock that no longer functions.
It held. The door stayed shut. I know this because I checked it four separate times between midnight and dawn.
Sleep came in pieces and went the same way.
Every time the fire shifted I was awake.
Every time the wind found a gap in the siding and the cabin creaked around it I was awake, lying still, running the same calculation I've been running for months.
The crawl along the back of my neck in an empty room.
I carried that sensation through two thousand miles of interstate.
I don't know if it will ever leave.
I lie still for another moment and take inventory.
My lower back aches, the kind that comes from a hard floor and not a mattress.
My shoulders are worse, the muscles along the tops of them pulled tight from yesterday's wood runs: four trips around the back of the cabin in wet clothes over uneven frozen ground, hauling split logs in my arms because I couldn't find anything to stack them in.
My calves are stiff from the hike in. My neck has developed an opinion about the folded jacket I used as a pillow.
I am twenty-five years old and I feel like eighty-five.
Montana. Not for the weak. Which raises the question of whether I qualify.
I sit up. The blankets fall. The cold arrives immediately, sharper than yesterday because the fire has burned down to ash and coals and there is nothing between me and the cabin's baseline temperature, which is not good.
I look around and let myself see it clearly in the morning light for the first time.
Water stain on the ceiling above the kitchen, old enough to have yellowed at the edges.
The window frame to my left is warped, a thin line of grey light visible where it no longer meets the sill.
The floorboard near the hearth gives under my weight, a soft yield that means moisture damage underneath.
The door, held shut by the armchair, has a crack running the full length of the left side of the frame from where it was kicked in.
The lock is broken. The latch doesn't catch.
I could list more but the inventory is already longer than I want it to be and I haven't had coffee.
The quiet man from yesterday said Mrs. Smith probably didn't know. From my one conversation with her she'd seemed like someone who meant what she said, a woman in her seventies who described the cabin as rustic but functional. She didn't seem like someone who knowingly rents derelict property.
I used to be a decent judge of character. Used to bbe.
I get up and roll my shoulders until the right one pops in a way that's unpleasant but necessary.
My clothes from yesterday are dry, which is the first good thing since I crossed the Montana state line.
They're yesterday's clothes, but they're all I have access to until I get back to the car. I add it to the list.
Coffee first. Mrs. Smith left basics in the upper kitchen cabinet: instant coffee, a tin of powdered creamer, salt, a few cans of soup with dust on the lids. Not generous. Functional. The coffee is the only thing I've been grateful for since I arrived.
I go to the kitchen and fill the kettle.
That's when I hear it.
A rhythmic scraping from outside. Regular. Methodical.
My hand stops on the kettle handle. The sound is steady and deliberate.
Someone is outside my cabin at an hour early enough that the light is still blue.
My body goes through the sequence it has learned: stomach tightens, breath shallows, eyes find the nearest exit.
Then the second sequence, the one I'm trying to build on top of the first: listen.
Assess. The sound is regular. Unrushed. Not trying to be quiet.
I go to the window.
Two of the men from yesterday are in my driveway.
They've shed their outer layers despite the temperature, working in dark thermal base layers fitted close across their strong shoulders and backs.
The bigger one, drives his shovel into a hard-packed ridge near the access road with the full weight of his body behind it.
The thermal pulls taut across his back with each push, damp with effort, and I watch the flex of his shoulders and the controlled force of the motion and I am aware, with a specificity I did not invite, of the way his body moves under the fabric. Large and unhurried and certain.
I don't need to register any of that. I don't need to take notice of the breadth of his shoulders or the way his forearms look when he grips the shovel handle.
I have spent the last six months learning to keep myself small and contained and invisible, and noticing a man's body while he shovels my driveway is not on the approved list.
My body disagrees. I override it.
He looks up.
He sees me. He goes still for a moment, then raises one hand. Slow. Deliberate. A careful motion, as though he's aware that fast movements are not welcome here. Then he gestures toward the front door.
I go to the door and work the armchair out of the way and open it.
He's on the porch putting his flannel shirt back on, working the last button at the collar when I step out. His fingers are sure and unhurried at his throat. I see this and I file it somewhere I don't intend to revisit.
He extends his hand. "We didn't get the chance to introduce ourselves yesterday. I'm Reid Calloway." He gestures back toward the driveway. "That's Owen. My nephew." A brief pause. "We're your neighbors."
I shake his hand because the alternative is standing here with my arms at my sides like I've forgotten what hands are for. His grip is brief and matter-of-fact.
"Maya." I pull my hand back. "What are you doing here?"
"Wanted to apologize properly. We heard you from the trail and we genuinely thought someone was in trouble." He says it in a straightforward way. "We're here to fix the door. Jace, my other nephew, went to see what he could do about your car."
The tightening across my shoulders is immediate and familiar. These men, in my space, doing things to my property that I didn't ask for. The proximity of it. The way it reorganizes the shape of my day without my permission.
"That's really not necessary," I say. "I can handle it."
Reid opens his mouth to say something, but before he can form words, the sound of an engine coming up the drive cuts what he was about to say.
We both turn. My Subaru is on a flatbed trailer behind a pickup, riding up the freshly cleared driveway with an ease it absolutely would not have managed an hour ago. The curly-haired one from yesterday is in the driver's seat. He parks, kills the engine, and gets out with a smug swagger.
He looks at me with the same expression of yesterday. Almost amused. Just this side of provoking.
"Keys," he says. "And I won't say no to coffee."
"As I was saying to Mr. Calloway," I start, "it's not necessary."
Jace turns to Reid and mouths Mr. Calloway slowly, savoring it. The amusement is entirely at my expense.
"We're not here to impose," Reid says. His voice has shifted, not harder but more definite. "But we fix what we break. It won't take long. Then we'll be out of your way."
I look at him.
He means it.
I nod.
I get the keys from inside and put them in Jace's outstretched palm and go back to the kitchen. I make coffee for four because the kettle is hot and I need something to do with my hands. Not because Jace asked for it. Definitely not.
From the kitchen window I watch Reid work.
He's taken the door off its hinges already, the broken frame laid out on the porch, and he's assessing the damage with his hands before he does anything else.
Running his palm along the split wood. Checking the hinge points.
He works like someone who has been fixing things for a long time.
I carry three mugs outside.
Reid stands when I come out and takes the mug with both hands. "Thank you," he says, and looks directly at me when he says it. Not the kind of look that slides past or through a person. The direct kind. The kind I'm not accustomed to anymore.
"You're welcome," I say, and find somewhere over his shoulder to put my eyes.
Owen is finishing up the far end of the drive. He straightens when I approach, takes the mug, wraps both hands around it.
"Thank you. You didn't have to," he says. A pause. "I'm sorry we scared you yesterday."
"It's fine," I say. It’s not and we both know it.
He nods and doesn't push it.
Jace has the Subaru off the flatbed and the hood up. He takes the mug when I hold it out without looking away from the engine.
"It overheated," he says. "Coolant line was on its way out. I patched it, but." He finally looks at me. "I wouldn't trust this car."
I resent that. The casual assessment of the thing I saved for three months to buy, the car that represented the only mobile exit I had from a city that had turned hostile, reduced to I wouldn't trust it. I know he's probably right. What I know and what I can afford are two different things.
"Thank you," I say. In the tone that means the opposite.
He catches it. The corner of his mouth moves into a near smile. He holds my gaze a beat longer than necessary, and I hold it back, because I will not be the one who looks away first.
I look away first.
Damn him.
I take refuge inside and stand at the kitchen window with my own coffee and watch the three of them without letting myself appear to be watching.
Reid works with his whole body, deliberate and efficient.
Owen is quiet and methodical, finishing one section of the drive completely before moving to the next, the shovel scraping in even strokes.
Jace moves in a more energetic way, hands busy, attention everywhere.
Remembering that Reid introduced them as neighbours, I set my mug down and go outside to question him.
"When you say neighbors…" I say to Reid through the open door.
"Further up the mountain." He's fitting the new door into the frame. The hardware he's brought is heavier than what was there before, a deadbolt that looks like it belongs on a vault. "Twenty minutes on foot." He glances over his shoulder. "Step back a little."
I step back. He lifts the door and guides it into the frame with one smooth motion, the weight of it obvious and the effort invisible. The muscles in his forearms tighten and hold. It seats into place on the first try.
Clean. Solid. The sound of something that will hold.
"You're all set," he says.
The Subaru starts up from the drive. Owen is already stacking the shovels in the truck bed, handles aligned, the same quiet precision he applied to the snow now applied to the cleanup. Jace drops the hood with a sound that carries in the cold air.
"We'll leave you to it," Reid says. "Anything comes up, we're up the mountain."
They pack up. They leave.
Then nothing.
The cold is very clear and very quiet.
I go inside. I close the door behind me. The lock catches on the first try, solid and certain.
The cabin is mine. Quiet. Exactly what I crossed two thousand miles to find.
I stand in the middle of it with both hands around my mug and wait for that to feel like what I thought it would feel like.
The coffee goes from hot to warm in my hands.
Then cool.
The feeling doesn't come.