Chapter 3
KENDALL
The kitchen smells like coffee and bacon, and I'm counting again. Not exits this time. Not cash, not miles, not hours since Anchorage. Those calculations are still running in the background, a low hum I've learned to live with. But this morning the math at the front of my mind is different.
The number of times Alex Sawyer's shoulder has brushed mine since breakfast, and why I'm keeping count.
The answer is four. The reason is a problem I'm not solving today.
Day two in Sawyer's Ridge. Days before Gary expects me to surface from Sitka and I don't: shrinking. Cash remaining after the truck and everything it took to get here: enough to make my stomach drop every time I think about it.
The storm is still screaming outside, and the lodge has settled into the rhythms of a building that expects to be sealed for a while.
Cameron has the stove going again. The smell of coffee and bacon fills the main room, and the warmth from the kitchen drifts into the corners where the central heating doesn't quite reach.
I'm at the counter drying dishes because it gives my hands something to do that isn't gripping the strap of my bag or checking the window for a change in the weather.
Cameron washes. I dry. The rhythm is easy and domestic in a way that makes my throat tight if I think about it too long, so I don't think about it too long.
"You don't have to do that," Cameron says. He says it the same way he said it yesterday, which is gently and without any expectation that I'll stop.
"I know."
"Most guests let the dishes pile up."
"Most guests didn't grow up with a mother who'd lose her mind over a water ring on a counter."
The sentence comes out before I've vetted it, and I hear the tense wrong as soon as it lands. 'Didn't.' Past tense. As if my mother is already gone rather than lying in a hospital in Sitka, dying by degrees, knowing her daughter made it out because she's the one who made sure of it.
Cameron doesn't catch it.
He nods and hands me a plate, and the simplicity of the gesture, the trust of it, sits in my chest like a warmth too big for the space I've made for it.
The thing about Cameron is that he's easy to be around.
Not easy in the way that means uncomplicated.
Easy in the way that means he takes up exactly the right amount of space and doesn't require you to perform anything to keep the room comfortable.
In one day I've already noticed: he asks questions by not asking them. He offers by doing rather than saying.
When he refilled my coffee this morning, he set the mug down near my hand without comment. The casualness of it almost broke me in half, because Gary used to pour my coffee too. The difference between those two gestures is a canyon I could fall into.
I don't fall into it. I dry the plate and put it in the rack and reach for the next one.
From the main room, Dash's voice lifts above the crackle of the fire. He's been talking for the better part of an hour, moving between topics with the restless energy of someone whose body was designed for open spaces and whose current reality is four walls and a storm that won't quit.
He's telling a story about a fishing trip that went wrong in a way that involves a bear, a canoe, and a series of decisions he acknowledges were poor even as he was making them.
"So at this point," Dash says, "the bear is in the canoe. Which is a problem, because my gear is also in the canoe, and the bear has found the trail mix."
"The bear is not in the canoe," Bryan says from the leather chair by the fire, not looking up from whatever he's reading.
"The bear is absolutely in the canoe."
"The canoe was twelve feet long. The bear would have capsized it."
"Bryan. The bear was in the canoe."
"You've told this story four times. The canoe gets longer every time."
I'm leaning against the kitchen doorframe with a dish towel in my hands, and the laugh comes out of me before I have a chance to hold it back.
It isn't the polite almost-laugh I've been managing since I got here. It's a real sound, sudden and full, pulled from somewhere underneath the careful composure I've been wearing like a coat two sizes too small.
It rings through the main room and surprises everyone, including me.
My eyes sting. The sensation is so unexpected that I press the dish towel against my face as if I'm wiping something off, and the fabric absorbs whatever is happening there before anyone can see it.
Months. It has been months since a sound like that came out of my body. Months since anything was funny enough to override the constant low-grade hum of fear that has been my background frequency since the night I locked myself in the bathroom.
Gary explained through the door, in his reasonable voice, that he was disappointed in me. I sat on the tile with my knees up and listened to every word.
Dash grins at me from the couch. The charm is fully operational, but there's no weapon behind it. "See? She gets it. The bear was in the canoe."
"The bear was probably near the canoe," Cameron says from the sink, and the diplomatic precision of it makes me almost laugh again.
Bryan turns a page. His silence on the matter is louder than anyone else's commentary.
The laugh fades but the feeling doesn't. It lodges behind my sternum like a bruise in reverse, healing instead of hurting, and I don't trust it.
I don't trust anything that feels this easy, because easy has always been the prelude to a cost I can't afford.
The morning passes in close quarters. The lodge is big enough to create the illusion of space but small enough that avoiding someone takes effort, and avoiding Alex takes more effort than I have.
He moves through the lodge like the building was designed around him. Doorways frame him without crowding. The bar stool where he sits to check his inventory might as well have his name carved into it.
When he crosses a room, the room adjusts. Cameron shifts. Dash straightens slightly. Bryan registers the trajectory without looking up. They move around each other without thinking, the kind of coordination that takes a long time to build.
I notice this because noticing is what I do.
Four years of reading Gary's moods made me fluent in the language of men who take up space, and Alex speaks it differently than Gary did.
Gary filled rooms by pushing. His presence was a displacement, a pressure that made everything else smaller by comparison.
Alex fills rooms by anchoring. He's the fixed point, and everything else orients toward him.
Including me. Which is a problem, because I've spent the better part of this morning failing not to notice his forearms. He rolled his sleeves up after breakfast, and the roped muscle and tendon under sun-darkened skin is wrecking my concentration.
His hands are broad, calloused, and they move with a certainty that makes me think about what else they'd be certain about. That thought is a door I'm not opening.
By midmorning the wind drops. Not stops. The shift is subtle, an easing from a roar to a moan, and through the main room windows the white wall softens enough that I can make out shapes beyond the glass. Trees. A slope. The suggestion of a ridgeline.
I find my boots by the mudroom door and pull them on before I've made the conscious decision to go outside. The coat I borrowed from a hook by the door is too big, men's sizing, and it smells like cedar and cold metal.
The porch is buried under snow. The steps have been shoveled, someone's early morning work, but the railing wears a thick cap of white. The boards creak under my weight.
The cold hits my face like a slap and my lungs seize on the first breath.
Then my eyes adjust, and I see it.
The ridge.
It rises behind the lodge in a wall of granite and snow and dark spruce, so massive that my depth perception stutters trying to place it.
The scale is wrong. Not wrong like a painting, wrong like a door opened into a room that shouldn't exist. The sky above the ridge is the color of a bruise, heavy purple pressing down on gray, and the clouds move across it with a speed that makes the mountain look like it's standing still against a river of weather.
Below the ridge, the valley opens up. Sparse trees, snow-covered meadows, the suggestion of a road buried under white. The emptiness goes on until it hits another line of mountains. Those mountains go on until they dissolve into cloud. The scale of it makes my chest feel hollowed out.
This is what freedom looks like when it isn't metaphorical.
Miles and miles of nothing that belongs to no one.
No roads, no fences, no systems that can be leveraged by a man with the right connections.
It's terrifying. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
The two feelings coexist without canceling each other out.
The cold burns the insides of my nostrils. My fingers are going numb inside borrowed gloves. I don't care. For the first time since Anchorage, the knot between my shoulder blades loosens by a fraction.
"You'll freeze out here."
Alex's voice comes from behind me, and my body does the thing it always does when a man appears where I didn't expect one. The flinch starts in my shoulders and runs halfway down my spine before I catch it and convert it into a turn that I hope looks casual.
He's standing in the doorway, shoulder braced against the frame, arms crossed. The posture is relaxed in a way that tells me he's been there longer than one sentence. Watching.
The flannel he's wearing pulls across his chest and shoulders, and the sheer width of him fills the doorframe the way a locked gate fills an opening. It should read as a blocked exit. Instead it sends a low, unwelcome heat crawling up from my hips.
The stubble along his jaw is darker than yesterday, and I notice this because apparently I've started cataloging his jaw, which is information I'll be processing later, privately, with great hostility toward myself.
"I've been colder," I say.