Chapter 13 Calder
Calder
The cabin wakes before I do, creaking timber settling in the mountain cold.
The wind is testing the shutters, early light filtering through gaps in the curtains like pale fingers reaching for warmth. I’m on my feet before full consciousness catches up, hand already on the knife I keep within reach.
Old habits die hard.
Roman drilled them into my skull so deep they’ve become reflex rather than thought.
I glance over at Saint, who is still asleep on the bed, curled tight against the blankets like she’s trying to disappear into them.
The ring on her finger catches in the morning light, foreign and permanent.
My wife. I knew I’d get married someday, but I never thought it would be to Saint James.
I pull on yesterday’s clothes and step outside into the air. It’s so crisp it stings.
The land stretches before me, pine forests climbing toward granite peaks, the creek below cutting silver through dark earth, morning mist clinging to the valley like something alive.
This place has always felt more honest than any church.
No pretense here. Just survival, adaptation, the quiet violence of nature doing what it does.
Restocking the woodpile will give me time to gather my thoughts.
I split logs until my shoulders burn, the rhythmic crack of the axe a meditation.
Physical work silences the noise in my head, the guilt, the want, the knowledge that I’ve trapped something beautiful and wild in a cage barely bigger than a grave.
After a bit, I head back inside and find Saint awake. Sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at her hands like they belong to someone else.
“Morning,” I say, setting the wood by the hearth.
She doesn’t respond. Just stares up at me with those blue eyes that have gone flat as river stones. Three days in, and I’ve already broken something essential in her. I make coffee, strong and bitter, and pour two cups.
I set one cup on the small table near the bed. She doesn’t move to grab it at all. I’m not sure why, but it irritates me.
“You need to eat.” I pull bread from the cabinet, slice it thick. “And drink something.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Doesn’t matter. Eat anyway.”
Her jaw tightens. For a second, I think she’ll fight me on it, and part of me hopes she will. Anger would be better than this hollow compliance. But she just takes the bread I offer, tears off small pieces, and forces them down mechanically.
I watch her eat, then turn my attention to the fire. The cabin’s warm enough now, heat pushing back the mountain chill.
“I feel like I’m disappearing.”
The honesty catches me off guard. I look at her, really look, and I recognize the behavior. I’ve seen it a million times before. She’s folding in on herself, losing color and shape. I need to get her out of this cabin. Get her out into nature, at least for a little bit.
“Get dressed,” I say, standing. “We’re going out.”
Her eyes widen. “Out where?”
“Not far. Just around the property. You need air,” I say, quickly throwing together some sandwiches and supplies.
Suspicion tightens her features. “Why?”
“Because if you stay in this cabin one more day staring at these walls, you’re going to lose your mind.” I grab my jacket from the hook. “Plus, I need to check the fence line on the north pasture.”
Twenty minutes later, we’re walking the perimeter of the upper grazing land, where the property opens to a snow-covered meadow before climbing toward the peaks.
The grass here is different from down in the valley, shorter, tougher, shot through with wildflowers usually, if the snow weren’t blanketing them.
Saint walks behind me, silent, her borrowed jacket too big across the shoulders.
The fence line runs for nearly a mile, barbed wire strung between weathered posts that my grandfather planted forty years ago. Some of the posts are rotting at the base, and the wire is sagging where elk or deer have pushed through. I stop at the first weak section and test the tension.
“Hand me the wire cutters.” I gesture toward the toolbox I set by her feet as I tug my gloves from my pocket and slip them on. Saint blinks like she forgot I was talking to her.
Then she opens the box, rummages through it, and pulls them out.
I cut away the damaged section and pull new wire from the roll we left out here last year when we mended the fences. The work is simple and repetitive. Stretch, staple, move on. Saint stands a few feet away, arms wrapped around herself against the wind.
“You can sit if you want,” I tell her. “There’s a flat rock over there.”
She doesn’t sit. She just stands there watching me work, her gaze distant.
After a while, I notice she’s not watching me at all.
She’s looking past me, toward the valley below, where the creek winds through cottonwoods just starting to bud.
Beyond that, the town sits small and contained, smoke rising from chimneys in the distance.
“It’s different up here,” she says suddenly. “Quieter.”
“Yeah.” I hammer a staple into the post. “That’s why I like it.”
“Does your family own all of this?”
“Most of it. The cabin, these pastures, the timberland to the east. My great-grandfather bought it piece by piece. Back when land was cheap, and people were desperate.” I move to the next post. “He wasn’t a good man, but he understood something important.”
“What’s that?”
“That land doesn’t lie. People do.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Considering, maybe? “Did you come here often? Before all of this, I mean.”
“When I could. It’s the only place Roman doesn’t show up unannounced.” I pause, realize what I’ve just admitted. “Was. Past tense.”
Because everything’s past tense now.
We work in silence after that, me fixing the fence, her standing watch like a ghost haunting her own life. The sun climbs higher, warming the air, and some of the tension leaves her shoulders. She unzips the jacket and tips her face toward the light.
“I used to think Montana was just… gray,” she says after a while. “All those fire-and-brimstone sermons about hell made me think heaven would be somewhere tropical. Palm trees and beaches.” She gestures toward the mountains. “But this is beautiful. In a harsh kind of way.”
“Heaven’s overrated.” I test the wire tension and am satisfied with the stretch. “This is better. Real.”
She almost smiles. Almost. Moving closer, she crouches down to examine some thistle near a rock. Her fingers brush the thorns, gentle and reverent.
“What are these?”
“Bull thistle. They’ll make flowers in June, but mostly stay like that the rest of the year. Stubborn little bastards.”
“My mom used to press flowers in books.” Her voice goes soft, distant.
It’s the first time she’s mentioned her mother. The first real piece of herself she’s offered me since I dragged her into this nightmare.
“You miss her,” I say. Not a question. I don’t pretend to know every single thing I could find out about her.
“Every day. Especially now.” She stands and brushes dirt from her knees. “She was so smart, and it seemed like she had an answer for every problem.”
“We’ve done decent so far. You’re doing okay. Surviving.”
“Am I?” She looks at me, and for the first time in days, there’s something sharp in her eyes. “Or am I just going through the motions until you decide what happens next?”
Fair question. An honest one. I pull off my gloves and shove them in my pocket.
“You’re surviving. And you’ll keep surviving. Because that’s what Bishops do, and you’re a Bishop now.”
Her face hardens. “I’ll never be a Bishop.”
“The law says otherwise.”
“The law doesn’t know what you did to me.”
“No,” I agree. “It doesn’t. But even if it did, it wouldn’t change anything.”
The moment stretches between us, taut and dangerous. Then she turns and walks away toward the next section of fence.
I watch her, the way she moves through the landscape like she’s always belonged here.
Like the land recognizes something in her that I’m only beginning to understand.
We work through the morning, stopping only when the sun’s directly overhead, and hunger becomes impossible to ignore.
I pull out the sandwiches I made before we left from the toolbox, nothing fancy, just bread and meat.
We sit and eat on sun-warmed rocks, even as snow is piled up around them, with the valley spread out below us like a promise.
“Can I ask you something?” Saint’s voice breaks the comfortable silence.
“Depends on the question.”
“Why did you kiss me back? That night. In your truck.”
I force myself to swallow, mainly to buy myself some time. “I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. For just a second, before you stopped. I felt it.”
She’s right. I did. And I’ve regretted it every day since, not because I kissed her, but because I didn’t kiss her properly. Didn’t take what I wanted when she offered it freely, before everything turned dark and twisted.
“It was a mistake.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer you’re getting out of me.”
She studies me, those dark eyes searching for cracks in my armor. Then she nods slowly, like she’s figured something out. “You wanted me then. You want me now. That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You took me because you could. Because Roman gave you the excuse you needed.”
“Don’t do that,” I warn. “Don’t try to make this into some fucked-up love story. I took you to keep you alive, period.”
“And the rest of it? The way you look at me? The things you did to me in the cabin?”
Heat floods my face. “That’s different.”
“How?”
“Because it is.” I stand and pack up the tools. “We’re done here. Let’s go.”
Saint doesn’t move, though. She sits there on the rock like a saint in a medieval painting, haloed by mountain light, utterly unmoved by my anger.
“You’re a coward, Calder Bishop.”
The words hit like a fist to the gut. “Excuse me?”