Chapter 1 #2
“Hey.” The smile widened, like he was genuinely happy to see a silver-haired stranger in a leather jacket scowling his way through a crowded store. “You’re up on Bear Creek Mountain, right? I’m Arek. Arek Jacobson.”
He extended his hand.
Fuck. He left me no choice because not taking it would be a thing, a statement. “Macallister Heald.”
His hand was warm, his grip firm but not competitive.
Steady. Someone who used his hands with precision and care.
His palm pressed against mine, his fingers closed, and for the duration of that handshake—two seconds, maybe three—I felt the warmth of another human being transfer into my skin like a current.
I couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched me.
Fraser had clapped my shoulder a few weeks ago, and I’d flinched. He hadn’t done it again. Before that, the Thanksgiving dinner, maybe. Handshakes with people whose names I’d already forgotten, in an experience that had left me shaking afterward, so I hadn’t tried to make contact again.
Other than that, nothing. Months and months of nothing but my own hands on tools and wood and the cold rubber of my truck’s steering wheel.
Jacobson’s hand was warm, and something in my nervous system cataloged it as significant in a way I didn’t understand and didn’t want to examine.
I let go, pulling back a fraction too fast.
One of the twins materialized at Jacobson’s elbow, the one who’d been tugging his sleeve earlier. “Dad, they have those chips Jules likes. Can we—”
“Go ahead.”
Boden used to do that—appear at my elbow with his random, urgent, absolutely critical requests.
Dad, can we get the blue ones? Dad, can we stop at the park?
Dad, look at this beetle, it has six legs.
Did you know beetles have six legs? He’d been young enough to think his father had answers.
Young enough to reach for my hand in a parking lot.
He was fifteen now. Sixteen in—I did the math, and Jesus, it hurt—three months.
And I didn’t know what chips he liked. Didn’t know if he still cared about beetles.
Didn’t know what his voice sounded like now, whether it had deepened, whether he still laughed with his whole body the way he used to, the way that made his eyes squeeze shut and his shoulders shake.
I blinked.
The boy vanished. And for half a second, Jacobson’s attention split, his eyes tracking his son down the aisle while his body stayed angled toward me.
I watched the low-level vigilance of a parent who never fully stopped accounting for his kids, even in a safe place, even in a grocery store in a town where the worst thing that happened was the bell sticking on the second ring.
I used to do that, track Boden through a room without thinking about it, keeping a peripheral lock on him at all times—at the park, at the store, at home. It was the constant background process of fatherhood, running quietly beneath everything else.
I’d shut that process down five years ago when I’d realized I was the thing my son needed protecting from.
Jacobson turned back with his full warmth directed at me. “Welcome to winter break chaos,” he said with a grin that invited me into the joke, into the shared absurdity of a grocery store turned war zone by vacationing families.
I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t return the smile. Instead, I nodded. Then I moved past him, grabbed the toilet paper, paid at the register, and walked into the gray morning without looking back.
My hands were tight on the steering wheel. I flexed my right hand, opened and closed it, and the ghost of his grip was still there, which was ridiculous. I’d shaken ten thousand hands in my life. This one was nothing. A social reflex. Skin on skin for two seconds in a grocery store. Nothing.
I parked at the old campground and got out.
For a moment, I stood in the cold, clean air and looked at what I’d built, or rather, what I was rebuilding.
The main house with its new roof, the shingles I’d laid myself.
Three cabins with reframed windows. The fire pit I’d cleared and circled with river stones.
The beginnings of something that might, over time, look like a place where people could gather.
Not me. I wouldn’t be the one doing the gathering, that was for damn sure. This place was a project—finite, solvable, designed to be finished and sold. I’d do my work, hire pros for what I couldn’t do myself, then get myself a buyer, sign the papers, and move on.
Where I’d go after, I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. I’d find something new to focus on. There was always another project, another mountain.
I put the groceries away, then went back to work, sanding the new window frames I’d put in so I could paint them later on. I pressed my palms flat against a frame, feeling the grain of the raw wood bite into my skin.
A jay screamed somewhere in the canopy, harsh and sharp, offended by something only it could see. Bear Creek was a constant gurgle, swollen and restless with melt.
I’d chosen this. All of it. The silence.
The solitude. The separation. I’d chosen it because the alternative was being close enough to hurt someone again.
Being in a room with my own son and knowing that my hands—these hands, the ones that could sand wood, swing a hammer, build something from scratch—could just as easily close around someone I loved and not let go.
Fay had never asked me to disappear. That had been my decision. There had been only one way to eliminate the threat and keep Boden safe from the thing that had already hurt his mother. Keep Boden safe from me.
I sanded until my arms shook with fatigue, but my mind wouldn’t let go. Like a splinter too deep to reach, one stupid, stubborn detail wouldn’t release its grip on me.
His hand had been warm. And I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt warm.