Chapter 28
JACE
The snowmobile sounds like the world clearing its throat.
I twist the throttle and the engine barks, loud and alive, vibrating through my legs and up my spine. We need to get one of this.
I rev it again. Just because.
"Quit playing." Owen's voice, flat, measured, arriving from somewhere behind me where he's straddling his own rental. "Have you read the last email with the deal conditions? Do you have any objections?"
I kill the throttle. The engine settles to an idle, ticking in the cold.
The rental lot in Briarhaven is mostly empty, just the three of us and a kid behind the counter who looked half-asleep when we picked up the keys.
The sun is low, throwing everything gold, and the mountains behind town are already going blue at the base.
"I read it," I say.
"And?"
I look at Owen. Then at Reid, who's adjusting the mirrors on his machine with the methodical attention he brings to everything, including, apparently, rental snowmobiles that will be returned in four hours.
The deal. The True North buyout. Six months of negotiations that ran through Owen's desk and kept him up past midnight more nights than I could count.
The investment fund came back with a final offer last week and I've been sitting with it, turning it over the way I turn over terrain maps before a new route, looking for the drop-off, the hidden crevasse, the thing that looks stable and isn't.
I didn't find one.
They agreed to what matters. Brand direction stays with us.
Quality standards are non-negotiable. Production stays national.
We keep our roles. Plus board seats. A plan for expansion that doesn't gut what we built to scale it.
Owen structured this. And the result is a deal that doesn't ask us to become something we're not.
It asks us to become more of what we already are.
Six months ago, I would have fought it. I would have seen the buyout as a leash. As someone else's hand on the throttle.
But six months ago, I didn't have a reason to care about what stays. About what lasts. About building something with a foundation that goes deeper than the next trip.
"I'm on board," I say. "I'm in favor."
I look at Reid. He meets my eyes and nods once, slow, the full weight of the decision in the gesture.
"Done," Owen says. Simply. "I'll contact them on Monday. Lawyers will draw up the paperwork."
Things are changing. The business expanding, and at home a woman that somehow became the center of everything.
This past week has been the best week of my life and I don't say that lightly because I've had some exceptional weeks.
I've summited ridges in Alaska and run white water in British Columbia and stood on the edge of a glacial field in Patagonia and felt the kind of freedom that makes your blood sing.
None of it compares to Tuesday morning, when Maya threw a dish towel at my head because I stole the last piece of bacon and Reid laughed, the deep unguarded kind.
We gear up. Helmets, goggles, gloves. The machines are solid, not top-end but well-maintained, and they move clean through the first stretch of packed trail out of town.
The three of us in formation. Reid in front, Owen to my left, me on the right with the open line toward the mountain.
The last week of March, and the snow is still deep at elevation but soft in the valley, the kind of transitional pack that won't last another two weeks.
We don't have much more time to do this.
Soon it'll be mud and meltwater and the sleds will go back to wherever rental sleds go when winter ends.
The trail opens up and we climb.
The snow goes from white to gold to copper as the light drops, and the shadows of the pines stretch long and blue across the trail. The air is cold enough to burn the inside of my nose but the machine runs warm between my legs and the vibration is steady and hypnotic.
We crest the ridge and the cabin comes into view below, the lights on, smoke from the chimney.
We ride down. Cut the engines in the driveway.
Maya appears at the door. Sweater, jeans, her hair piled up, a pencil still tucked in her hair bun where she forgot about it. She looks at the three snowmobiles and her eyebrows lift. I am off the sled and crossing the gravel before the engine has fully stopped ticking.
I pick her up. She makes a sound that's half surprise and half the laugh I live for, the involuntary one. I kiss her because she's here and I don't need a better reason than that.
Reid passes us on the steps. "Go put on something warm," he tells her, already heading inside. "Extra layers. We've got a surprise."
Maya looks at me. "It's going to be dark in twenty minutes."
I grin. "That's the plan."
I set her down. Owen is there immediately, his hand at her jaw, tilting her face up, and the kiss he gives her is quieter than mine but no less thorough. She melts into it for a second, then pulls back with a slightly dazed look in her eyes.
Inside, the cabin becomes organized chaos. Reid is in the kitchen making sandwiches, moving with the efficient calm of a man who has packed provisions for a thousand outings and could do it blindfolded. He fills a thermos with coffee.
Owen checks the thermostat, adjusts the heating timer so the cabin will be warm when we get back. The small, logistical acts of care that Owen does without being asked and without expecting acknowledgment.
I go to my room. Find my favorite beanie, charcoal grey, worn soft from years of use. Bring it to Maya and pull it down over her ears.
"There," I say. "Now you're expedition-ready."
We assemble outside. Helmets, goggles. Reid has the thermos in a pack on his back. Maya looks at the three sleds, then at us, and crosses her arms.
"There are three snowmobiles and four people," she says. "So which two of you are doubling up?"
She says it with a straight face. With perfect delivery. The implication that she'll drive one herself, alone, at night, through mountain terrain she's never navigated, hanging in the air like a punchline waiting for someone to laugh.
"Very funny," I say. "You're with me."
"Why you?"
"Because I'm the best rider, I know every trail in this valley."
"He's not wrong," Reid says.
She climbs on behind me. Her arms wrap around my waist, her chest against my back, her thighs bracketing mine. The contact is immediate and complete. Her warmth against my spine, her grip tightening when I start the engine, the small adjustment of her weight as she finds her balance.
We move out.
I ride with Maya pressed against my back and the trail opening ahead of us in the headlight beam, the snow glowing white against the dark of the pines.
I take the long route deliberately. The scenic loop that runs along the creek and through the old-growth stand where the trees are so tall their tops disappear into the dark. The snow is firm and clean and the machine cuts through.
Maya's arms tighten around me on the first curve. Loosen as she adjusts. Tighten again on the next climb and this time her hands flatten against my stomach.
I point out things as we ride. The frozen creek bed where the ice is blue-green in the headlight.
The stand of birch that catches moonlight like bone.
A set of elk tracks crossing the trail, fresh, the snow barely disturbed.
Maya leans to look at each one and her weight shifts against me and I feel every adjustment.
The trail narrows and steepens and the machines work harder, the engines climbing in register, and then we break through the treeline and the sky opens and the world goes wide.
The ridgeline. Two thousand feet above the valley. Snow stretching in every direction, pristine, untouched, glowing faintly in the moonlight. The mountains dark against the sky.
When we stop and kill the engines the silence is total and enormous.
Reid swings off his sled. Pulls the thermos from his pack.
"Coffee?" he asks Maya.
She takes the cup with both hands. The steam rises and disappears. We stand in a loose circle and share the thermos, passing it between gloved hands, and the coffee is hot and dark and the best thing I've ever tasted because everything tastes better at altitude with people you love.
Love.
The word arrives without warning. It's just there, in the space between one swallow of coffee and the next, sitting in my chest like it's been sitting there for weeks and has only now decided to introduce itself.
I love her.
I love Maya in the specific, present-tense, rearrange-your-life way that I have never loved anything that wasn't a mountain or a brother or an uncle who saved me from becoming someone I don't want to think about.
And for the first time in my adult life, I don't want an exit. I don't want the next trip. I don't want the open trail and the solo tent and the specific freedom of a man who never stays long enough to lose anything.
I want this. Exactly this. Standing on a ridge in the cold with three people who are my whole life and knowing I'm not going anywhere.
"Turn off the lights," Reid says.
Owen reaches back and kills his headlight. I do the same.
Darkness. Total, engulfing, the kind of dark that makes you aware of your own body as the only warm thing in a cold world.
The stars sharpen. The snow glows faint and blue.
And for a moment there is nothing but the sound of four people breathing and the distant, thin call of something wild in the valley below.
Then Reid says, quiet, like he's been waiting for exactly the right second:
"There. It's starting."
I look up.
The sky is moving.
It starts low on the northern horizon, a faint green shimmer that could be mistaken for cloud or imagination.
Then it lifts. Expands. The green deepens and pulses, a curtain of light that ripples like fabric in a wind that doesn't exist, and then a second curtain appears behind the first, this one edged in violet, and the two of them begin to move together across the sky in slow, enormous waves.
The aurora borealis.
Nobody speaks.
The light builds. Green and violet become green and violet and pink, streamers of color arcing from horizon to zenith, the whole sky alive with a rhythm that belongs to something so much larger that makes you feel small and enormous at the same time.
Reid breaks the silence first. He's standing behind Maya, looking up, and when he speaks his voice is a reverent whisper.
"It never gets old," he says.
Owen is on Maya's other side. Maya's hand finds his. I see her fingers thread through Owen's under the lights.
"I've seen a lot of skies," I say. "Patagonia. Alaska. The at night." I look at her. She looks at me. Green light moving across her face. "This is the only sky I want to come home to."
She reaches for me. Her free hand, finds the front of my jacket and pulls me in and I go, and she's holding Owen's hand and reaching for me and Reid is right there, solid and still, and the four of us stand on the ridge in the light of a sky that is doing impossible things and I understand, finally, completely, with the kind of clarity that only comes when you stop moving long enough to feel where you are, that this is not a stop on the way to somewhere else.
This is the destination. This is the whole trip.
The aurora shifts above us. Green to violet to green again, rippling, enormous, indifferent to the four small people on the ridge below.
I watch her.
The way the green catches in her tears and turns them to emeralds. The way her mouth is open, just slightly, in an expression of wonder.