Chapter 8 MAYA
MAYA
The ceiling has a knot in the wood grain that looks exactly like a fox.
I've been staring at it for the better part of an hour. I know this because the light through the window has moved a full hand-width across the far wall and I've tracked every inch of it, which is the kind of thing a person does when they have absolutely nothing else available to them.
I am losing my mind.
I am a person who does not stop moving. In LA my days had a specific architecture: up before six, run the Silver Lake reservoir loop before the heat arrived, coffee from the place on Rowena.
Lesson plans on the commute. Prep during lunch.
After-school art club Tuesdays and Thursdays, the hour after spent cleaning paint off surfaces that were never going to come fully clean and not minding.
Dinner with whoever was available, or alone with a book and the window open, the sounds of the city present and specific and alive.
Until Daniel. Until staying in motion meant running into the evidence of everything I'd lost.
He took everything from me.
My therapist's voice surfaces, measured and familiar: What you consented to and what he did are two different things. And the fact that he had to erode your boundaries over time tells you had boundaries.
I know. The knowledge sits in my head like a correct answer to a question I'm still feeling in my body.
An intellectual solution to a problem that lives somewhere below thought, in the part of me that still flinches at the sound of a notification and checks the locks twice and chose a cabin in the mountains in Montana because it was the kind of nowhere a person could stop being findable.
I shake my head and look away from the ceiling.
The room is warm. The fire Reid built before he left this morning has held well, the logs settled into a steady burn that doesn't need tending.
The quilt is heavy and good quality. The pillow situation is excellent.
Objectively, this is a comfortable room and I should be able to manage one day of forced rest without descending into crisis.
It's not just the stillness.
I can acknowledge that now, at least to myself. The last person through that door was Reid. The last thing Reid did before he left was hold my face in his hand and tell me, in a voice that left no room for discussion, that I would stay in this bed.
The most alarming thing about that interaction is that some part of my body went very quiet and very warm the moment he did.
I am not following my body anywhere. My body has terrible judgment. My body is the reason I'm in Montana.
I sit up.
I already showered in the ensuite bathroom, already changed into the clothes I found folded on the chair: dark sweatpants I had to roll twice at the waist, a thermal top in charcoal grey, wool socks that swamp my feet.
Fifteen uninterrupted minutes of hot water that didn't turn to ice without warning.
I can hop. I proved that this morning, in the shower. My ankle is a manageable problem and the four walls of this room are a more immediate one.
I push the quilt back and swing my legs over the side of the bed.
The good ankle takes my weight. I test the sprained one, a pulse of protest, hot and specific, pushing up through the joint and into my calf. Not unbearable. I have a wall. I have a functional upper body and a compelling personal need to see something that isn't this bedroom.
I hop to the door.
The hallway opens in a way the bedroom didn't prepare me for.
I knew the house was big, that registered the first night through the fog of hypothermia and three men rearranging my circumstances without asking, but moving through it slowly, with nothing to do but look, gives me a different picture.
Dark wood paneling. Wide-plank pine floors worn smooth.
The walls hold photographs, landscapes mostly, the mountain in different seasons, a shot of three figures on a ridge with their backs to the camera, the peaks behind them fading blue-white into distance.
A coat rack by the far door carrying enough layers for six people.
Bookshelves built into a nook where a hallway turns, full and disorganized in the way of books that actually get read.
No decorative objects. Nothing placed for appearance.
But the house is large and solid and warm in a way that has nothing to do with square footage.
Every room I can see from here opens generously into the next, wide doorways, high ceilings that hold the woodsmoke smell, furniture that was chosen to be sat in often.
I work my way along the wall, palm flat against the wood, and I'm moving well enough that I make it almost to the end of the hallway before my bad ankle catches a raised floorboard edge. My weight tips forward. My hand loses the wall.
Two hands catch me.
One at my waist, one at my elbow, the grip firm and immediate, absorbing the forward momentum before it can finish becoming a fall.
My shoulder connects with a chest and my fingers close around a forearm, and then I'm upright and still and there is a person standing to my left who I didn't hear at all.
Owen.
We are close. His forearm is solid under my grip, the muscle in it tensed from the catch, and his hands are still at my waist and elbow, steady while he reads me over. The contact is small and specific and warm and I feel it radiate through my body.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah." My ankle has a dissenting opinion.
He doesn't let go immediately. His hands are warm through the thermal fabric. My fingers are still around his forearm. His eyes, this close, are a specific amber-brown at the center that shifts darker at the edges, and he is looking at me with the kind of attention that lands and stays.
I release his forearm. He releases me at the same moment, steadying me against the wall first, making sure I have it before he steps back.
"I was bored," I say. "Bed rest is not a skill I have."
There is a threat of a smile on his face. "Come on," he says. "I have something for you."
He offers his arm without making a production of it.
I take it. He adjusts to my pace without comment, taking on more of my weight than I mean to give him, and we're close enough moving through the hall that our sides stay in contact from shoulder to hip.
He smells like cedar soap and something warmer underneath it, something my nervous system files as safe before I've made any conscious determination about it.
The tension across my shoulders drops a fraction.
Owen opens the door at the end of the hall.
It's a working room. Shelves with books, the spines worn soft.
Two dark monitors on a desk. A sofa along the near wall, wide and deep, brown leather aged to butter from use.
A smaller fireplace already going. The whole room has the quality of a space that gets used seriously and has never been arranged for company.
"Jace went to your cabin this morning," he says. "He brought your laptop. Your phone. The notebook that was on the kitchen table." A pause, careful. "We didn't look at anything. We thought you'd want them close."
I go still.
Something moves through my chest fast enough that I don't catch it before I'm already turning toward Owen and putting my arms around him.
Pure reflex, gratitude arriving before the more sensible parts of me have anything to say about it.
Thank you for thinking of me. Thank you for knowing what I'd need without asking.
He goes still. One beat, two, a man recalibrating, and then his arms come around me. His hand settles between my shoulder blades, careful, and I can feel his heartbeat under my ear, slow and steady.
I pull back.
My face is warm. I concentrate on a point past Owen's left shoulder while I locate the parts of myself that know how to behave and reassemble them into something functional.
Owen clears his throat and steers me toward the sofa and moves the coffee table closer with one foot, settling one of the sofa cushions on it.
"Sit."
I sit. He crouches in front of me and takes my ankle in both hands and moves it onto the cushion with a care that is so specific and deliberate that I feel it in places that have nothing to do with my ankle.
He reaches past me for the throw blanket on the sofa back and settles it across my legs, tucking the edge.
Then he brings my things from the desk and places them within reach.
I go for the laptop immediately.
"Limited screen time," Owen says. "You hit your head and need to be careful."
"I know. Just finishing a project." I open the file. The fox kit is there, exactly where I left it, one paw forward, not committed. I study the line of the ear, the shadow I haven't finished beneath the chin.
Then, curiosity takes the best of me. "What do you do in here all day? I know Reid works at the wolf rescue center. What about you and Jace?."
Owen looks up from where he's setting my notebook on the cushion beside me. A beat passes. Small, but I catch it.
"I handle finances, mostly. Remote work." He straightens. "Jace does guide services and runs field expeditions. That sort of thing."
I wait for more. It doesn't come. The answer is accurate and contained and it closes like a door, politely. But Owen is entitled to his privacy. I am the last person who gets to push on that.
"And you?" he asks.
"Illustrations. Children's books, mainly." I pull up my working file. The fox kit blinks back at me. "This one is part of a series about hard concepts. Loss. Grief. Fear."
Owen looks at me from across the desk where he is settling. That quality again, the one that sees more. "That's really good," he says.
I look back at my screen. My face warms under the praise before I can stop it.
He opens his laptop. Reaches into the desk drawer. Puts on his glasses.
I look up once, involuntary, and look immediately back down.
They are dark-framed, rectangular, slightly too serious for his face, and that is precisely the problem. The glasses add a layer of quiet authority that I am completely unprepared for.
The room settles into quiet. The fire ticks low. His keyboard starts, even, unhurried, the rhythm of someone who knows exactly what they're doing.
Owen looks up from his screen.
"Fifteen minutes of screen time." He looks at his watch. "Starting from when you opened the laptop." His eyes come back to mine. "I'm watching the clock."
Yes daddy arrives fully formed at the front of my mouth.
I hold it there.
I look at my screen. The fox kit looks back at me, one paw forward, not quite ready to commit to whatever comes next.
I understand entirely how it feels.