Chapter 7
seven
Hazel
I wake up to the sound of the woodstove, the low settled tick of a fire that's been going for a while, which means he's been up for at least an hour, which means I slept later than I meant to and he let me.
This is something he does. I have stopped arguing with it because I have learned, in the last ninety days, which battles Rafe Dannick will yield on and which ones are simply not up for discussion.
Sleeping in, when I need it, is not up for discussion.
I lie still for a moment and look at the ceiling. His ceiling. Our ceiling, which still lands differently than I expect every time I think it.
I came home forty-one days ago. I have been counting.
Protective custody was what it needed to be and nothing more. A safe house outside Kamloops, two RCMP officers on rotating shifts, a laptop they let me use for work once the Crown finished with my files. I talked to Beauchamp twice a week.
I talked to Rafe every night on a secured line — once he was out of surgery, once the doctors had confirmed what he'd told me in the truck was actually true, that it was meat and nothing more, that the kidney was fine, that he was going to be irritatingly fine and was already arguing with the nursing staff about leaving.
The first call was three days after the gravel lot and I sat on the edge of the safe house bed and listened to his voice and didn't say anything for about thirty seconds and he said “I'm here, Hazel”, and that was all I needed.
After that he called every night, telling me about the woodshed roof once he was home, the gate latch he'd replaced, the first snow on the ridge coming earlier than expected.
He wanted to come get me the week he was cleared to drive.
Beauchamp said not yet, and I told Rafe that, and there was a silence on the line that communicated very clearly what he thought of Beauchamp's timeline.
I told him to wait. He waited, which I know cost him, and which I will not forget.
I said I love you every time before we hung up. He said it back every time, which is not nothing for a man who measures his words the way he measures coffee grounds.
The charges against Voclain were filed in September.
Three executives took plea deals within the first two weeks.
Dev's girlfriend gave a statement that corroborated everything on the laptop, which I didn't know until Beauchamp told me, and which put me on the floor of the safe house in a way I hadn't expected.
Dev deserved better than what happened to him.
He is going to get justice, which is not the same thing, but it is what there is, and I am going to make sure it holds.
Voclain's lawyers are buying time. It doesn't matter. I have time now.
I pull on his over-sized flannel that has become mine and go out to the main room in my socks.
Rafe is at the table with his coffee and a hand-drawn sketch I recognize as the rough layout for a bathroom addition off the north wall.
He's been talking to a plumber in Silver Ridge, working out the rough-in, planning it. It’s been the project since I got home.
He started the framing the week I arrived, in that way he has of doing things without announcing them, and I came outside one morning to find him already four posts in.
He looks up when I come in.
"Mornin’."
"Morning." I pour myself a coffee and lean against the counter and look at him in the morning light coming through the east window.
The same light that was on his face the first morning I woke up here, when he was already in the chair by the window with the rifle across his lap.
He doesn't sit in that chair much anymore.
He sits at the table now, with his coffee and his sketches, or on the porch with his feet on the rail watching the road the way he still watches it, out of habit, out of the particular vigilance that is just the shape of him.
I don't mind the vigilance. I have come to understand it as a form of love.
"How'd you sleep?" he asks.
"Well." I sit down across from him. "You?"
"Enough."
This is true. He sleeps now, properly, most nights, which took time and which I don't comment on because he is not a man who wants to be observed healing. He just does it, quietly, the same way he does everything else.
I pull the sketch toward me. He's marked the north wall in red with a note in his careful print: load bearing, needs assessment.
The addition footprint is roughed in beside it, two small squares, including one that says bathroom and one that says her office, because he drew that second one in without asking, just decided it was going to be there, and when I pointed it out he said you'll need somewhere to work and went back to measuring.
I look at the little square that says her office for a moment longer than necessary.
"Plumber can come Thursday," he says. "If you want to be here for it."
"I want to be here for it."
He nods, like that was never really a question.
I push the sketch back across the table and look at him properly in the morning light — the scar through his eyebrow, the grey coming further through the dark, his hands around the mug.
The scar on his left forearm pale and familiar.
I know that story now. I know most of his stories now, with more still to come, and the more still to come is the part that gets me sometimes, quietly, when I'm not braced for it.
He looks up and catches me looking.
"What?"
"Nothing."
His eyes drop to the flannel. Back up to my face. Something shifts in his expression, small and specific, the thing that lives just to the left of a smile on him and that I have learned to read as well as I've ever read anything.
He pushes back from the table and stands up and comes around to my side and I tip my face up and he kisses me, unhurried, his hand coming to the back of my neck the way it always does, and I reach up and curl my fingers around his forearm — the scarred one, the familiar one — and hold on.
When he pulls back he doesn't go far. His forehead comes down against mine.
Outside the morning light is moving through the spruces. The stove ticks. Somewhere down the slope a bird starts up and goes quiet again.
"Rafe."
"Yeah."
I don't say anything else. I just stay there with my forehead against his and my hand on his arm and the flannel warm around my shoulders, and he stays too, and the mountain does what it does around us, and that is enough.
That is everything.
Thank you so much for reading Captured by the Mountain Man Bounty Hunter.