Chapter 5 Evelyn
evelyn
I don't sleep.
That's not new. I haven't slept properly in months.
At some point the insomnia stopped being a symptom and instead became my whole personality.
Hi, I'm Evelyn Porter, I have a master's degree in library science and I haven't experienced REM sleep since the last season of Game of Thrones. Nice to meet you.
But tonight it's not the usual carousel of panic that keeps me up. Tonight it's worse. Tonight it's him.
I'm lying on a mattress that came with the rental cabin. It’s full-size, but it sags in the middle like it's trying to swallow me. So I’m staring at the ceiling and replaying every single moment of the last six hours in excruciating, high-definition detail.
My brain has helpfully organized the footage into categories.
Category one: His hands.
The size of them. The roughness of his palms against my fingers.
The way he wrapped them around that thermos like he was trying to keep it from running away.
The veins on the backs of them, running under the tattoo ink, and the way the tendons shifted when he poured the coffee.
I'm going to need to stop thinking about tendons because this is getting clinical and also I'm sweating.
Category two: His voice.
Low. Steady. The kind of voice that doesn't rush because it doesn't have to. The way I felt his every word in my spine. There’s nothing frivolous. Every word costs James something and he's decided I'm worth the expense.
Category three: The headlights.
That's the one that's killing me. Not the hands, not the voice, not the jaw or the shoulders or the tattoos winding up his forearms into territory I am not thinking about at one in the morning in a cabin I've lived in for eighteen hours. It’s the headlights that threaten to break me.
One flash in my rearview mirror. I'm here. You're safe. Goodnight.
I push my face into the pillow and it smells mildly like mold.
But I don’t care because he followed me up the canyon road.
I would have never asked. I learned years ago that asking for help meant owing someone and owing someone meant losing another piece of myself.
I would have buckled my anxiety into the front seat and gotten on with my night.
But James didn’t need to be asked. He just did it and then he was gone.
Nobody has ever made leaving feel like a kindness before. My ex made every departure into a crisis. It was always where are you going? When will you be back? Who's going to be there? Leaving a room was a negotiation. Leaving the house was a tribunal. Leaving him was…
I can’t do this to myself. Not tonight. I roll onto my side and pull the blanket up.
Tonight I'm going to lie in this sagging bed in this tiny cabin at the top of a ridge in a town no one has ever heard of. I'm going to think about James Holt's hands for an unhealthy amount of time and I'm not going to feel guilty about it because I deserve this.
I deserve one stupid, harmless, middle-of-the-night spiral about a man who poured me coffee from a thermos and drove behind me up a mountain to make sure I didn't go off a cliff. That's not dangerous. That's just time well spent. It’s self care really.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand and it spikes my adrenaline.
The instant full-body clench that hasn't gone away even though I changed my number twice. I grab the phone too fast and don’t let out an exhale until I see it’s Cece.
My sister is the one person on the planet who didn’t make me feel insane for running.
Cece: You alive up there in the wilderness?
Me: Alive and the first day went well. The library is tiny and perfect. Looks like a Hallmark town.
Cece: Excellent. And??? The town? The people? Any hot lumberjacks?
I stare at the screen. My thumb hovers.
Me: There might be a guy. Not so much a lumberjack as a mountain man type.
Three dots appear instantly. Disappear. Appear again.
Cece: EVELYN MARIE PORTER. It has been ONE DAY.
Me: Believe me, I know.
Cece: One. Single. Day.
Me: I KNOW.
Cece: Tell me everything immediately. Is he tall? He's tall isn't he? You always go for the tall ones.
I laugh and it’s real. It’s the kind that comes out before you can catch it. I roll onto my back and type with both thumbs.
Me: Tall. Broad. Dark hair, dark eyes. Tattoos. Ex-military. Works as a handyman. His sister works at the library and apparently set up a blind date situation that I accidentally walked into.
Cece: I'm sorry, his sister set him up on a blind date and he showed up and YOU were there?
Me: I was shelving picture books on the floor. He thought I was the date.
Cece: Were you?
Me: No. But I didn’t mind.
Cece: And he stayed.
Me: He stayed.
Cece: Evie, you deserve this. You know that, right?
My throat tightens. I do not know that. I know it intellectually, the way you know that the earth orbits the sun. But that has zero impact on how you feel at two in the morning when you're alone in a strange cabin and your hands still smell like someone else's thermos.
Me: How are you? How's Birdie?
The pivot is obvious and I don't care. I need to stop talking about James Holt before I say something that makes it real. I need to hear about my niece. More than that, I need to hear that my sister is fine because Cece being fine is one of the few constants I have left.
Cece: Oh you know. Birdie's got a cold, hasn't slept in three days, so neither have I. The usual chaos. But who cares? Tell me more about the mountain man.
She pivots back fast. Too fast? I don't know. It's hard to read tone in a text. But there's something about the way she keeps redirecting toward me and away from herself that snags in the back of my mind.
I let it go. Cece's life is the together one. Cece has the husband, the house, the daughter, and the put-together Instagram grid with the matching throw pillows to prove it. She’s the sister who calls me to check in, not the other way around. That's how it's always been.
I'm the mess. She's the map.
Me: Not much more to tell. We had coffee. He followed me home to make sure I made it up the canyon road. He flashed his headlights when I got out of my car.
Cece: He WHAT.
Me: Flashed his headlights. Like. Goodnight.
Cece: Evelyn, I need you to understand that I just clutched my chest like a Victorian woman and Birdie is looking at me like I've lost my mind.
I'm laughing again. Quietly, in the dark, in a cabin that still doesn't feel like mine yet but feels less empty than it did this morning.
Me: It's nothing. It's probably nothing, but I do appreciate the distraction. I'm here to work and breathe and figure out how to be a person again.
Cece: I know, babe. But also you're allowed to be a person who has coffee with a hot handyman. Those aren't mutually exclusive.
Cece: brB. Birdie’s awake.
Me: Talk tomorrow. Love you.
Cece: Love you.
I stare at the screen for a minute after it goes dark. She didn’t mention Greg a single time. That’s odd. She and my brother-in-law are like one person in two bodies. Normally I can’t escape chatter about him. But it’s probably nothing.
I'm an overthinker. That's what I do. I take perfectly normal moments and run them through the catastrophe filter until they come out warped. Cece is fine. Cece is always fine. I file my thoughts in the things I’ll worry about later drawer which is already dangerously full.
I plug my phone in and put it on my nightstand. Then I roll over and close my eyes.
I think about the fact that I came to Iron Peak to be alone, and it's been one day and I'm lying in the dark wondering what James Holt's voice would sound like saying my name in a room with no one else in it, in the dark, close enough to feel his breath, and…
I pull the pillow over my face.
"Get it together, Porter," I whisper into the cotton.
The cotton does not respond. The cotton is not helpful. The cotton smells and I need to throw it in the washer.
I finally fall asleep sometime around three. When I dream, it's not the usual nightmare with the locked door, the footsteps, and the sound of my own name used like a weapon. It's a pair of headlights flashing in the dark. Steady. Patient.
I'm here. You're safe. Goodnight.
Morning comes too fast and too bright. The cabin has east-facing windows that I didn't think about when I rented it sight unseen. So the sun comes through the canyon gap and hits me directly in the face like a personal attack at 6:47 a.m.
I shower in a bathroom the size of a phone booth. Then I wrestle my hair into a bun that I already know won't last past noon, put on my glasses, and stare at myself in the foggy mirror.
"Day two," I tell my reflection. "You are going to go to work. You are going to be professional. You are not going to think about anyone's forearms or tattoos while on the clock."
Instead, I think about his forearms the entire drive down the canyon road.
The library is quiet when I get in. June is already here, but I'm starting to think June doesn’t leave. She's got the coffee going in the staff closet and a stack of holds to process.
"Morning," she says. "You look like you slept well."
"I didn't sleep at all."
June nods. "That's the altitude. Give it a week."
It is one-hundred percent not the altitude, but I see the out and take it. My other option is telling my new boss that I was awake until three in the morning thinking about her coworker's brother's tendons like a total freak. I'd like to keep this job for more than forty-eight hours.
I throw myself into work. It helps get my mind unstuck. Shelving, scanning, processing holds, and learning the quirks of a circulation system that's at least ten years out of date isn’t for the faint of heart.
June shows me how to run the printer. Her process involves a specific sequence of button presses that she describes as "percussive maintenance.
" I learn that the Veteran’s Support Group meets on Tuesday evenings in the conference room and that the empty lot beside the library hosts a farmers market.
The old-timers in the reading chairs refuse to acknowledge each other's existence despite sitting four feet apart every single day.
This place is good.
It's quiet, small, and manageable in a way that makes it feel like it’s already mine.
I can’t remember the last time something felt like mine.
But I earned this degree. I studied for it while he monitored my laptop.
I wrote papers in the bathroom with the door locked.
Somehow I graduated with honors while the person who was supposed to love me told me I'd never use it.
But I'm using it. Today. In this tiny library in a canyon town in Colorado. And I'm not going to let any man, even one who manages to make headlights sexy, make me forget why I'm here.
I make it all the way to 11 a.m. before June says, casually, while restacking the new releases, "You know, Jocelyn's been trying to get James out of the house for months."
I don't look up from the hold shelf. "Mm."
"He doesn't go anywhere. Work, Hank's porch, their mother's house. That's been it since he got back."
"Mm-hmm."
"He came to the library yesterday. First time."
I can feel her looking at me. I can feel my face heating. I am aggressively alphabetizing and I will not be drawn out.
"He seemed different yesterday. Not in a bad way, just… " June pauses. "Quieter. Like the volume got turned down on him and nobody could find the dial."
I do look up at that. Because I know what it looks like when someone's volume gets turned down. I see it in the mirror every morning.
"He seems okay," I say carefully.
June tilts her head. Smiles. "He seemed better than okay yesterday."
I go back to alphabetizing. I don't ask what she means. I already know what she means. And somewhere between the hold shelf and the circulation desk, I let myself think just for a minute that maybe I'm not the only person in Iron Peak who came here to put themselves back together.
Maybe I'm not the only one whose volume got turned down. And maybe that's not a reason to run. It's a reason to stay.