Chapter 5
Mel
I stand on the sidewalk outside Wylde Beans for three seconds. Sam’s voice in my head from last night, in the ladies’ room: “Coffee tomorrow morning. Nine AM. Just us. You’re coming.”
It wasn’t a question then. It’s not one now. I’m here because I said yes with pink cheeks and a drink I suddenly needed to finish very quickly, and because not showing up would tell those two women more than showing up will.
Deep breath. Door open. Here we go.
Sam and Tate are already at the corner table.
“She came,” Sam says to Tate, like I’ve just confirmed a bet.
“I told you she’d come,” Tate says.
“You said fifty-fifty.”
“Those are good odds.”
“Thanks for coming,” Sam says, turning to me. “I know last night felt like an ambush.”
“It was an ambush. You cornered me between the paper towel dispenser and the hand dryer.”
“The bathroom has limited tactical options. I worked with what I had.”
“Sam rehearsed,” Tate says.
“I did not rehearse.”
“You said, and I’m quoting, ‘I’ll open with something casual and then pivot.’”
“That’s called a conversation, Tate. That’s how conversations work.”
I sit down. There’s a coffee waiting for me. Black. They either remembered from the bar or guessed, and both options mean they’re paying more attention than I expected.
“Before we get into it,” Sam says, “and we are getting into it, the fact that it’s none of our business is entirely irrelevant, but first: we don’t actually know you.
I know you’re Connor’s sister, I know you just moved back from California, and I know Connor describes you as ‘smarter than me but don’t tell her I said that. ’ That’s it. So. Real version.”
The thing about Connor is that he talks about his crew the way other people talk about family, which means I already know the broad strokes.
Sam is the lawyer, Doris’s niece, came to the mountain and stayed for reasons Connor describes as “Cayden finally stopped being an idiot.” Tate is the land manager who showed up to survey the timber harvest and met Koda when his grin bounced off her like a tennis ball off a brick wall, which is Connor’s phrasing and I suspect it’s accurate.
But knowing about someone isn’t knowing them, and these two women sitting across from me with their coffee and their opinions are sharper and warmer and funnier than Connor’s secondhand version could capture.
Sam tells me about her pro bono cases with an energy that makes it clear she’d burn down a building for those kids if the legal system didn’t give her better tools.
Tate talks about land management the way other people talk about religion: quietly, seriously, like the dirt and the trees are a responsibility that’s sacred.
They ask about me. I give them the press-release version and Sam tilts her head and says “and the real version?” So I tell them about the smoothie guys and the slim-fit pants and the skincare routines, and Tate says “Koda uses a face wash that costs forty dollars and he thinks I don’t know” and Sam says “Cayden uses bar soap for everything, including, I suspect, his hair” and we’re laughing and it’s easy and I think: I could have this.
This could be mine. Friends who ask the real question and laugh at the real answer.
Then Sam puts her coffee down. The shift is subtle but clear.
“Okay,” she says. “Let me tell you what I saw last Friday night. I saw a man who left a bar three minutes after you sat down, and he never leaves first. But then he stayed the entire night this week. I saw that same man watch you across a table for two hours while maintaining a completely neutral expression, which, by the way, is harder than it looks. Cayden used to do the same thing and I had to practically set myself on fire to get a reaction.”
“Graham’s not Cayden,” I say.
“No. He’s worse. Cayden was a wall. Graham is a wall with surveillance cameras.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. Tate smiles into her coffee.
“And can we just talk about the whole...” Sam waves her hand in a circle, searching for the word.
“The silver fox lumberjack thing? Because I can appreciate the gray at the temples on a man who looks like that? With the quiet authority? That’s a very specific kind of attractive and you landed right in it. ”
“He’s not a silver fox,” I say. “He’s got gray at the temples. That’s like ten percent silver.”
“Ten percent is enough. Tate, tell her ten percent is enough.”
Tate takes a sip of her coffee. “I’m not getting involved in the percentage discussion.”
“You don’t have to. Your face is doing it for you.”
Tate’s face holds a smirk.
“The point is,” Sam says, “that man has a whole vibe. And he has aimed that vibe directly at you and you’re sitting here telling me there’s nothing to discuss.”
“He stayed,” I say, because there’s no point denying what three women saw with their own eyes.
“He stayed,” Sam confirms. “And when you walked past him and said whatever you said, his hand tightened on his glass so hard I thought the thing would crack.”
I didn’t see that. I was looking ahead. I said “you stayed” and kept walking and I didn’t look back. But Sam did.
“Can I say one thing?” Tate says. First words with any weight since she sat down.
“Please.”
“I’ve known Graham for a while now. He’s steady.
He’s the most even-keeled person on that crew, and I’m including Noah, who reads weather textbooks for fun.
I’ve never seen Graham rattled. Not in a storm, not on a bad cut, not when Koda nearly dropped a tree on the equipment trailer. ” She pauses. “He’s rattled.”
The word sits between us on the table. Rattled. Graham Brady, the man who notices everything and reacts to nothing. Rattled.
Sam leans forward. “Here’s the other thing. And I’m telling you this because someone should have told me about Cayden and it would have saved me weeks of losing my mind. Graham doesn’t do this. I asked around. Casually.”
“You asked around casually,” Tate repeats, with the tone of a woman who knows exactly how casual Sam is capable of being.
“I was very subtle.”
“You asked Koda.”
“Koda is a reliable source.”
“Koda told Boone within the hour.”
“Koda is a reliable and indiscreet source. The point is: nobody has seen Graham with anyone. Not in the whole time he’s been on the crew.
Not once. No dates, no names, no woman dropping by the work site with lunch.
Koda says he’s ‘married to the mountain,’ which is Koda for ‘I’ve never seen him look at a person the way he looks at the terrain. ’ Until now.”
Until now. The two words land and I hold them carefully, like something I’m not sure I’m allowed to keep.
“What are you going to do?” Sam asks. Not pushing. Just asking.
“I don’t know. He’s on my brother’s crew. He’s...” I don’t finish the sentence. Older. Careful. The kind of man who stops his own hand halfway to your face when he thinks better of it.
“He’s what?” Sam says.
“Complicated.”
“Mel.” Sam puts her coffee down. “They’re all complicated. That’s not a reason.”
“Complicated isn’t a dealbreaker. It’s the entrance fee,” Tate says.
Tate touches my wrist. Quick, light. “You don’t have to know yet. Just don’t pretend it’s not there. We tried that. It doesn’t work.”
I look at these two women who’ve already been where I am, on the other side of a man who won’t close the distance, and I think: this is what it feels like to have people in your corner. Not colleagues. Not California friends who know your coffee order and nothing else. People.
“It’s there,” I say. That’s all. That’s enough.
Sam grins. Tate nods. We drink our coffee and talk about other things and the morning is warm and easy and I leave Wylde Beans with something I didn’t have when I walked in, which is the certainty that I’m not imagining this and two women who’ll tell me so when I try to convince myself I am.
~~~
I drive home from Wylde Beans with Sam’s voice in my head and Tate’s quiet certainty and a warmth in my chest that has nothing to do with coffee. The morning is still bright. It’s 11 AM.
At 2 PM, I’m driving to Graham’s cabin for the hour logs we agreed on.
I spend the three hours in between telling myself that the timing is a coincidence.
That I’m not going to Graham’s cabin on the same day two women just confirmed that the most controlled man on the mountain is rattled because of me.
That the conversation at Wylde Beans has nothing to do with the fact that I changed my shirt twice before getting in the truck.
I changed my shirt twice. I’m not going to think about that.
The sky is different this afternoon. Heavy.
Grayer than December has been since I arrived, like the mountain finally remembered what season it is.
The warm front that’s been sitting over the range all week feels thin, stretched, ready to snap.
Rain starts on the last mile, light and steady, tapping the windshield.
Graham opens the door before I knock. He saw my truck from the window. Of course he did.
“Hour logs,” I say, holding up the empty folder.
“On the table.”
He steps back. The same creation of space. I walk in.
The cabin is the same. Clean, spare, ordered. Except the guest mug is on the counter by the coffee maker, not in the cabinet. Out. Ready.
I don’t say anything about the mug. He doesn’t either. He pours coffee into it and sets it in front of me and I sit at the kitchen table and we go through the logs and outside the rain picks up.
“You were going to kiss me,” I say.
I don’t plan it. It comes out the way true things come out: without permission, mid-sentence, while I’m looking at an equipment log for the third week of November. My pen stops. The cabin is quiet except for the rain.
Graham sets down his coffee. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the table, and then the window, and then the table again, and I watch him choose his words with the precision of a man who measures everything twice.
“Yes,” he says.
One word. The same way he says my name. The same way he says everything that matters: once, without decoration.