Chapter 13 Maya
MAYA
Brody had sent us out to restock the emergency supply points along the northern ridge, which was a solid half-day job involving a lot of hauling, a lot of trail, and a lot of Nate.
Just over a week into the volunteer program and we’d fallen into a routine.
Brody assigned him to me more often than not, because of course he did.
Somewhere along the way I’d stopped fighting it.
Nate was good company in the field. He worked hard, didn’t need to fill every silence with conversation, and had figured out my systems well enough that I only had to explain things once.
It also didn’t hurt that watching him haul supply crates up a steep trail was, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, extremely rewarding. But that was beside the point.
We’d knocked out three of the four checkpoints by early afternoon, and the last one sat at the far end of the ridge trail, about a twenty-minute hike past the falls. Which meant we were coming up on Fogarty’s hut any minute now.
Nate spotted it before I said anything.
“Holy shit.” He slowed on the trail; his eyes fixed on the squat timber structure tucked back in the tree line. “It’s still standing.”
“Fogartys built things to last.”
The hut looked the same as it always had, more or less. Rough-hewn logs, a corrugated tin roof gone orange with rust, a small, covered porch with a bench seat that had seen better decades.
“He still out here?”
“No, he moved to Charlotte about five years ago. His kids keep an eye on the place, but none of them want it, and he won’t let them sell.” I ducked under a low branch. “Old Fogarty rules. Only a Fogarty can live in Fogarty’s hut. His words, and trust me, nobody argues with that man.”
Nate snorted. “Sounds about right.”
“So, it just sits here. Which is a waste, honestly, but try telling a ninety-year-old man he’s being unreasonable about a hut his grandfather built with his bare hands.”
Nate looked from the hut, back at the trail, then out through the trees where the ridge dropped away to the glint of the river far below.
“Imagine not taking the chance to live on the edge of a national park.”
“Right?” I shook my head. “If I could live here, I’d never leave.”
He glanced at me, an unreadable look in his eyes, then stepped off the trail, toward the hut, and I followed.
The door was unlocked, as it always was.
Nate ran his hand along the doorframe, taking it in. “How long since you’ve been out here?”
“Couple months. I check on it now and then, make sure the supplies are still good and nothing’s nesting in the walls.” I nudged the door open. “Come on.”
Inside, the hut was a single room, small and dim, with the smell of old wood and dust. There was a wide bed against one wall, supply shelves against the other, a potbelly stove in the corner, an old couch, and a rough wooden table with two chairs taking up what was left of the floor space.
Basic, functional, and oddly comforting.
He lowered himself onto one of the wooden chairs, looked around the room. “Hasn’t changed.” His gaze drifted to the bed, and I knew exactly where his mind had gone.
“That’s where we put Jensen.”
“Yeah.” I leaned against the table, arms folded. “He was so pale. Ready to pass out at any second.”
“He almost did. You were the one who kept him talking.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Yeah, you did. You were always like that.”
“Like what, exactly?”
“Fearless.”
The word landed somewhere soft and bruised, and my first instinct was to bat it away.
“Fearless is a stretch.” I laughed, reaching for lightness. “I was just bossy. There’s a difference.”
“No, there isn’t. Not the way you did it.”
His sharp, probing stare pinned me to the floor. “Well, I was a kid. Kids don’t know enough to be scared.”
“That’s not true, and you know it.”
His voice was quiet but certain. The hut suddenly felt small, airless.
“What happened to that version of you?”
The question sat between us, simple and direct and impossible to dodge.
“What do you mean, what happened?” Yeah, there was a tone. Did I give a fuck? No, I did not.
Nate shifted his weight, resting his forearms on his knees.
His gaze held mine. “I mean the Maya I knew would have climbed the roof of this place just to see if she could jump into the pines. The Maya sitting in front of me checks her watch every twenty minutes to make sure we’re exactly on schedule. ”
“That’s part of my job, Nate.” I crossed my arms, my skin prickling. “It’s called being responsible.”
“It’s not just the job, Slayer.” He tilted his head, his eyes tracking over my face, searching for something.
“You used to be a force of nature. You threw yourself at the world like you were daring it to catch you. Now you just play everything so incredibly safe. It’s like you’re trying not to leave footprints. ”
The dusty air in the hut turned too thick to breathe. His words stripped me right down to the studs. I needed to snap at him, to tell him he had absolutely no right to waltz back into my life and diagnose me like a stalling truck engine.
But the righteous anger wouldn’t come. Beneath the immediate, hot flare of defensiveness, a tiny, annoying voice whispered that he was completely, devastatingly right.
And god fucking dammit, I’d spent years sanding down my edges, and he’d seen right through the smooth finish in a matter of days.
I turned my back to him and stepped toward the supply shelves. “Nothing happened.” I straightened the cans on the shelf, so their labels lined up.
“Grew up, or gave up?”
“That’s not fair.”
“I’m not trying to be fair. I’m asking.”
I opened my mouth to fire something back, only to choke on the silence. The honest answer sat right there, lodged in my throat. Too heavy to say out loud, too sharp to swallow.
Nate waited. He was infuriatingly good at waiting, perfectly content to leave me dangling on the hook.
“I’m fine, you know. My life is… it’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
The hut was very quiet. Just the creak of old timber and the distant rush of the falls.
Then, “You don’t sound like you believe that.”
I shrugged.
“You know what I think?” Nate leaned back in the chair, arms crossed. “I think you know exactly what’s missing. You’re just scared to go after it.”
My whole body tensed. “That’s a bold claim from a man who’s planning to flee the state.”
He gave me a measured stare. The silence stretched tight enough to snap.
Oh fuck, I’d whacked back too hard.
But then the corner of his mouth pulled up. “Fair point.”
“Thank you.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong, though.”
His blue eyes held mine without flinching, piercing straight through every wall I’d built, right down to the foundation, where all the cracks were.
I looked away first.
“We should get moving.” I straightened, reaching for my pack. “Last checkpoint won’t restock itself.”
He stood without argument, the chair scraping against the floor. I was already at the door when his voice caught me.
“Hey, Maya?”
I turned. He was still standing by the table, filling up the small room, his expression unreadable.
“We didn’t call you Slayer for nothing. That girl who took charge when Jensen got hurt? She’s still in there.” He said it simply, like it was an absolute certainty. “You didn’t lose her. You just stopped letting her out.”
I didn’t trust my voice, so I nodded and stepped through the door into the sunlight.
The trail to the last checkpoint had never felt so long. We walked in silence, but Nate’s words bounced around in my head, stubborn and persistent and impossible to shake.
You just stopped letting her out.
The worst fucking part was that he was right. And I had absolutely no idea what to do about it.