Chapter 8 Jace
Jace
Itexted Talia at seven AM on Saturday, knowing she’d be awake because chefs kept baker’s hours even when they weren’t actively running a kitchen.
Her response came three minutes later: Where are we going?
Somewhere you’ll remember.
That’s cryptic.
That’s the point. See you at 9.
I spent the intervening two hours on patrol paperwork I’d been avoiding, but my mind kept drifting to the plan I’d made.
Taking Talia back to the meadow felt significant in ways I wasn’t ready to examine too closely.
That place had been ours when we were kids, before my family stopped coming to Hollow Haven, before I’d spent fifteen years becoming someone who was more comfortable with wildlife than people.
Going back with her felt like testing whether the connection we’d had as children could translate into something real as adults. Whether the ease I felt when she was teaching me to cook was just nostalgia or something that could actually build into more.
At eight forty-five, I loaded my day pack with water, trail snacks, a first aid kit, and the emergency gear I carried out of habit even for short hikes.
Then I drove to her cottage, arriving exactly at nine because punctuality mattered in wilderness work.
Being late could mean missing a weather window or losing daylight you needed to get back safely.
She was waiting on the porch, and something in my chest loosened at the sight of her. Auburn curls pulled back in a practical ponytail, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt that looked soft from washing. Actual hiking boots instead of the tennis shoes tourists always wore despite posted warnings.
“Morning,” she said, climbing into my truck with easy grace. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going now?”
“Not yet.” I pulled away from the cottage, heading toward the trails on the east side of town. “But you’ll know when we get there.”
She studied me while I drove, and I felt the weight of her attention like a physical touch. “You’re different today.”
“Different how?”
“More relaxed. Less like you’re playing ranger and more like you’re just yourself.”
The observation surprised me with its accuracy.
I did feel more relaxed. Being with Talia had started feeling less like reconnecting with an old friend and more like discovering someone I actually wanted to know.
The cooking lessons we’d shared over the past few weeks had revealed someone curious and passionate and funny in ways that made me look forward to our time together with an intensity that probably wasn’t entirely professional.
“Maybe I’m just myself,” I said. “That’s what happens when you’re with someone who knew you before you learned to pretend.”
“We were children. You barely knew who you were yet.”
“I knew I wanted to spend every possible minute outside. That I felt more comfortable tracking deer than making conversation at my parents’ dinner parties.
That you were the only person who didn’t make me feel weird for caring more about ecosystems than social hierarchies.
” I glanced at her. “Some things don’t change. ”
She was quiet for a moment, processing. Then she said, “You really do prefer being alone out here, don’t you? It’s not just your job.”
“I prefer being alone to being around people who don’t understand what matters to me,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”
“And what matters to you?”
“The forest. The watershed. Making sure this place stays wild enough that the species that depend on it can survive.” I turned onto the access road that led to the trailhead. “But lately I’ve been remembering that it’s possible to care about people too. If they’re the right people.”
I felt her looking at me again, but I kept my eyes on the road. If I looked at her now, I’d say something I wasn’t sure either of us was ready to hear.
We reached the trailhead parking area, and I grabbed my pack before leading her to the trail entrance. The path was narrow here, overgrown enough that most hikers missed it entirely. Good. I didn’t want to share this with anyone else today.
“I know this trail,” Talia said after we’d been walking for five minutes. “Or I used to know it.”
“Keep going. You’ll remember.”
We hiked in comfortable silence, and I found myself hyperaware of her presence behind me.
The sound of her breathing, steady and controlled.
The occasional rustle when she brushed against vegetation encroaching on the path.
The way she moved with easy confidence that suggested she’d spent enough time outdoors to trust her footing.
The trail climbed gradually through mixed conifer forest, sunlight filtering through the canopy in shifting patterns. A Steller’s jay scolded us from somewhere overhead, and I automatically tracked its location while scanning for what had disturbed it. Old habits from years of wilderness work.
After twenty minutes, the trail broke out of the forest into an opening, and I heard Talia’s sharp intake of breath behind me.
“The meadow,” she said quietly. “Oh my god, Jace. It’s exactly the same.”
It wasn’t exactly the same. Twenty years had changed details that only someone who’d spent every day here would notice.
The old snag where we’d once spotted a nesting hawk had fallen and was now slowly decomposing back into the forest floor.
The creek had shifted its channel slightly, carving a new path through the sediment.
The willows along the water’s edge had grown taller, more established.
But the essence of the place remained unchanged.
The bowl-shaped meadow, maybe two acres across, surrounded by forest on three sides and opening to the valley view on the fourth.
Native grasses gone golden in the autumn sun.
The creek running clear over stones that clicked and murmured.
The quality of light that felt different here, softer somehow, like the meadow existed slightly outside normal time.
“I can’t believe you remembered this place,” Talia said, moving past me into the meadow proper.
“I never forgot it.” I followed her to the creek bank where we’d spent countless hours as kids, looking for interesting stones and watching for trout. “This is the first place I came after I moved back to Hollow Haven. Needed to know if it was still here, still the way I remembered.”
“And was it?”
“Better than I remembered. Because I’d spent fifteen years thinking maybe I’d romanticized it.
Made it more special in my memory than it actually was.
” I set down my pack and crouched beside the water, trailing my fingers through the current.
“But it really is this perfect. This quiet. This removed from everything else.”
She knelt beside me, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. I could feel the warmth of her body, could catch the vanilla and honey scent that seemed to follow her everywhere.
“We used to catch crawdads here,” she said, peering into the clear water. “You’d flip rocks and I’d grab them when they tried to escape.”
“You were fearless about it. Most kids won’t touch crawdads.”
“Most kids hadn’t been raised by a grandmother who believed handling ingredients meant understanding where they came from.” She smiled at the memory. “She made me help with the garden too. Taught me that killing a chicken for dinner meant respecting the animal enough to do it properly.”
“I remember your grandmother. She was intense.”
“She was practical. Said city people had forgotten that food came from somewhere real, and she wasn’t raising a granddaughter who’d be squeamish about reality.
” Talia sat back on her heels. “She died my junior year of high school. Heart attack while she was working in her garden. At least she went doing what she loved.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“No reason you would. Your family had stopped coming to Hollow Haven by then.” She looked at me. “Why did they stop?”
The question I’d been avoiding for years. I stared at the water, watching it slide over stones, trying to find words for something I’d never articulated clearly even to myself.
“My parents got divorced,” I said finally.
“Hollow Haven was my dad’s family tradition, not my mom’s.
After the split, neither of them wanted to come back because it reminded them of trying to maintain appearances when everything was falling apart.
” I picked up a smooth stone and turned it over in my palm.
“I was fourteen. Old enough to have opinions, young enough that nobody cared what I wanted.”
“And you wanted to come back.”
“Desperately. I wrote letters to my dad begging him to bring me back. Offered to come alone if he didn’t want to deal with it.
Promised I’d pay my own way somehow.” The old frustration rose in my chest, still sharp after all these years.
“He said I was being dramatic. That there were plenty of other places to hike and I’d get over it. ”
“But you didn’t get over it.”
“I never got over it. I spent the next six years counting down to college, planning to study forestry or ecology or anything that would get me back to places like this. And after graduation, I applied for every ranger position in the western states until Hollow Haven had an opening.” I looked at her directly.
“I came back the first chance I got. Been here three years now.”
“That’s a long time to carry a place in your heart.”
“Some places are worth carrying.”
We were quiet for a moment, and I found myself studying her profile.
The way afternoon light caught in her auburn hair, turning it copper and gold.
The curve of her jaw, the slight upturn of her nose.
Details I’d been noticing more often lately, filing away like important data about species behavior and seasonal patterns.