Chapter 7 #2
She holds it together through the planning session. She holds it together through dinner at Logan's, where Erica makes pasta and Lucy climbs into Shelby's lap and shows her a dinosaur book and Shelby reads to her with a voice that only trembles once.
She holds it together in my truck on the drive back to Mountain Ready.
She falls apart in the dark of the access road, about halfway up the mountain, with no audience except me and the stars.
"Pull over," she says suddenly.
I pull onto the shoulder. Cut the engine. The silence is total.
"I can't do this," she says. Her voice breaks on the last word.
"Can't do what?"
"This. All of it. The community, the people, the plan. Everyone rearranging their lives for me. I don't know how to receive this, Cory. I don't know how to be someone people protect. I've never been that person. I've always been the person who leaves before anyone has to bother."
Her hands are shaking. She clenches them in her lap.
"I'm going to ruin this," she says. "I ruin everything by leaving.
It's the only thing I know how to do. And one day, whether it's because of Garrett or because of an assignment or because the walls close in the way they always do, I'm going to leave you.
And you'll have mobilized an entire town for a woman who couldn't stay. "
I'm quiet for a long time. Not because I'm processing. Because I need her to hear what I'm about to say in the silence first, feel the weight of it before the words arrive.
"Are you done?" I ask.
She blinks. "What?"
"Are you done telling me what you're going to do? Because I'd like to tell you what I'm going to do."
She stares at me in the dark cab, eyes glittering with tears she's fighting.
"I'm going to love you," I say. "Not because you stay.
Not because you're brave. Not because you've earned it or proven you deserve it or demonstrated the appropriate level of commitment.
I'm going to love you because you walked onto my mountain and saw the parts of me I hide from everyone, and you didn't look away.
You sat with me. You held my hand in the firelight and asked me what I was still surviving, and no one has ever asked me that. "
My voice is steady. The steadiest it's been since Tyler Rawlings.
"If you leave, I'll wait. If you come back, I'll be here. If you need to run, I'll understand, because I know what running looks like from the inside. But I am not going to pretend this didn't happen. And I am not going to let you convince yourself you don't deserve a place to land."
She makes a sound. Small and broken and raw.
"I'm scared," she whispers.
"Good. That means it matters."
"What if I can't be what you need?"
"You already are."
She unbuckles her seatbelt. Climbs across the console.
Settles into my lap in the driver's seat, which is absurd and uncomfortable and neither of us cares.
Her arms go around my neck and her face presses into my throat and she cries.
Not delicately. Not performatively. The deep, racking sobs of a woman who has been carrying her own weight since she was twelve years old and has just been told, for the first time, that someone else will hold it.
I hold her. I don't say it's okay. I don't promise the fear will go away. I just hold her in my truck on the side of a mountain road with the stars overhead and the valley below and I let her break because she needs to, and because I'll be here when she puts herself back together.
After a long time, she lifts her head. Her face is streaked and swollen and she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
"I need to go back to Denver," she says.
Everything in me goes cold.
"My editor wants a face-to-face meeting about the piece. I need to file the draft in person, approve the photo selects, and handle the contract details for the feature. It's a two-day trip."
"I'll go with you."
"You can't leave Mountain Ready. Tuck can't run the school alone and you have the corporate group from Boulder arriving next week."
She's right. I know she's right. The tactical reality is that I can't abandon my operation for two days, especially not with a potential threat in the same state.
"Then Logan goes with you."
"Cory..."
"Non-negotiable. You are not driving to Denver alone while Garrett Hollis is somewhere between here and there. Logan or Dan or Miguel. Someone goes with you."
She studies my face in the dark. Reads whatever she finds there.
"Okay," she says softly. "I'll ask Logan."
I cup her face. Kiss her forehead. Her nose. Her mouth, tasting salt and fear and something underneath both of them that tastes like trust.
"Two days," I say. "You come back to me in two days."
"I'll come back."
"Promise me."
She holds my gaze. "I promise."
I start the truck. We drive the rest of the way up in silence, her hand on my thigh, my hand covering hers. The mountain looms above us, dark and white and ancient, keeping its own counsel.
She's leaving. Tomorrow. And every instinct in my body, every lesson the mountain has taught me about patience and stillness and waiting out the storm, is screaming that letting her drive down this road is the wrong call.
But I can't keep her here by force. She's not a woman who stays because someone tells her to. She stays because she chooses to. And if I take that choice away, I lose her faster than any blizzard or any stalker ever could.
So I let her go. I let her go and I trust the plan and I trust the people and I trust that the woman who promised to come back means it.
And I call Cal Hayes from my cabin at midnight and say three words that a SEAL never wants to say.
"I need help."
Cal's response is immediate and exactly what I need. "We've got you, brother. Hold the line."
Hold the line. I lie in a bed that smells like her and I stare at the ceiling and I hold the line.