Chapter 10
ALEX
Kendall sleeps on her side with one hand curled under the pillow and the other resting on my forearm. The grip is loose but present, the hold of a woman who fell asleep touching me and hasn't let go.
The bruise on her ribs is a yellow-brown shadow in the morning light, fading toward gone.
My thumb traced it last night before she told me to stop being careful.
The shape of it is burned into my hands now, the exact location, the ridge of bruised tissue under skin that should never have been broken.
Gary Simmons put that bruise there. I have his name now, his face from the charity gala photographs, and the missing persons report he filed to get her back. All of it sits in my head while his wife sleeps in my bed with her hand on my arm.
She doesn't know I know.
The ceiling is pine, knotted and dark with age.
My father built this room. He drove every nail, planed every board, and hung the door that Kendall's back was against last night when I unbuttoned the flannel she'd borrowed from the hook by the mudroom.
He built a home, filled it with a family, and broke his wife until she died on the road to Palmer.
The room he built is warm, solid, and indifferent to what happened inside it.
I lie still and listen to Kendall breathe.
The rhythm is slow, even, the breathing of someone not bracing for anything.
She sleeps differently here than she did the first night.
Back then, I could hear her moving through the floor of her room for hours.
Now she sleeps with her face pressed into my shoulder and her fingers wrapped around my arm.
The flannel she wore to bed is unbuttoned, and the bare skin of her stomach is warm against my side.
Her hair smells like my shampoo. The combination of her body in my bed and my soap on her skin triggers something territorial in me that I'm not interested in examining or apologizing for.
She's here. She's mine. The fact that I have to blow this apart in the next hour doesn't change either of those things.
The pass will open today or tomorrow. Cameron confirmed it yesterday.
When it opens, Gary Simmons gains access to the same road Kendall used to get here.
The missing persons report gives him jurisdiction to ask questions, and a man with money on that scale has the resources to hire people who are good at finding answers.
I should tell her what I know. The name, the report, the fact that her husband is looking for her with resources that make her head start irrelevant. Every hour I hold this information is an hour I'm deciding what she gets to know about her own life, and Bryan already told me what that looks like.
'Context isn't permission, Alex.'
My brother is right about most things. He was right about this.
The woman sleeping against me has spent years with a man who controlled her information, managed her reality, decided what she needed to know and when.
I am not that man. I refuse to be that man.
But refusing and acting are two different operations, and one of them requires me to open my mouth and say words that will change the way she looks at this room, this bed, and me.
The light moves across the ceiling. I lie in the dark of what I know and wait for her to wake up so I can blow it apart.
She stirs against my shoulder. The hand on my arm tightens, then relaxes, then tightens again as the waking catches up with the reaching.
Her body goes through the same check I've watched in animals startled from sleep: tension, assessment, location.
She knows where she is before she opens her eyes.
The tension drains out of her shoulders.
"Morning," she says into my collarbone.
"Morning."
"What time is it?"
"Late enough that the coffee is cold."
She lifts her head. Her hair is wrecked and her face has the crease of the pillowcase stamped across one cheek. She looks at me with an expression I haven't seen from her before, something unguarded and sleep-softened that lasts for a breath before the sharper version of Kendall returns.
"I'll make more," I say.
"I'll come with you."
We dress without talking. She adjusts the flannel and her jeans.
When she bends to pick up her bra from the floor, the flannel rides up and the curve of her lower back catches the light.
The scratch marks from my hands are faint red lines across her hip.
My body remembers making them. The memory is immediate, physical, and useless for the conversation I need to have before this morning is over.
I watch her move through my room, picking up her clothes from the places I put them last night, and the weight of what comes next presses down on every second of it.
The pass is opening, and every instinct I have says she'll be on that road the minute it's clear.
She has a bag on the floor by her bed and boots pointed at the door, and the clock is running on how long I can keep what I know to myself.
She finishes dressing and heads for the door. I follow her downstairs, past the third step, into a kitchen that's gone cold overnight. The fire burned down while we slept. I rebuild it while she makes coffee, and the routine of it feels like something we've been doing longer than we have.
She knows where the filters are, knows the grinder jams if you push too many beans through at once. She learned the kitchen like she learns everything, by watching without asking, storing information without advertising that she's collecting it.
The lodge settles around us. The timber groans in the cold, a low complaint that I've been hearing since I was old enough to listen. This building talks. It tells you where the weight sits, where the cold gets in, where the years have loosened the joints between log and frame.
My father built it to last. It has lasted. The fact that it survived him is justice enough.
Kendall moves through the kitchen with the borrowed confidence of a woman who has made a temporary space her own without meaning to.
The flannel she's wearing is the same one I unbuttoned against my bedroom door last night.
Seeing it on her body in the morning light tightens something in my throat I wasn't expecting.
"Bryan's at the overlook," I say when the coffee is poured. "Cameron and Dash are on the road."
"That's an early start."
"They have things to check."
She wraps both hands around her mug. The steam rises between us. She's reading me over the rim with the trained attention of a woman who learned to decode men's moods as a survival skill. I let her look. I have nothing to hide this morning except the thing I'm about to stop hiding.
"You look like you didn't sleep," she says.
"I slept fine."
"Liar." The word is light, almost teasing, but the assessment behind it is clinical. She clocked the circles under my eyes before her first sip. "You were awake when I woke up. You were awake when I fell asleep. At some point between those two things, a person usually closes their eyes."
"I had things to think about."
"Must have been serious. You have a line between your eyebrows that wasn't there yesterday."
She reaches across the counter and touches it. One finger, quick, matter-of-fact. The touch is casual. The effect of it is not.
"You're doing it again," she says.
"Doing what?"
"Looking at me like you're about to say something that changes the room."
She's right. She's always right about the looking. Living with a man like Gary Simmons taught her to read the weather in a room before the storm hits. That skill is pointed at me now across the kitchen counter.
"Kendall." I set my mug down. "I found something you need to know."
The mug stops halfway to her mouth. Her hands go still, the controlled stillness of someone who has been called into rooms before by men with bad news, and the stillness is its own kind of armor.
"Go ahead," she says.
"I found a missing persons report. It was filed out of Anchorage. The reporting party is a man named Gary Simmons."
The name hits her the way a round hits a target. The impact is visible in her hands, her jaw, the place between her shoulders where the tension snaps tight. The mug goes down with a click that sounds louder than it should in the quiet kitchen.
"Nothing I need to worry about," she says, flat and precise. She's quoting me from yesterday morning, and the words sound different coming back.
"I lied," I say. "You need to worry about it."
She waits. The stillness is its own demand.
"I found it on a missing persons clearinghouse over the satellite connection. Your description matched, and the photo confirmed it."
"How long have you known?"
"Since before you came downstairs yesterday morning."
The words land between us like a stone in still water.
I watch the ripples cross her face. The calculation behind her eyes is fast, thorough, and visible.
She's assembling the pieces. I can see her fitting them together: the patrols that started before I had a name to give them, the argument about the road, the report that turned suspicion into certainty.
She's putting this morning in the sequence too, my hands on her body, my mouth on her skin, the knowledge of her husband's name loaded behind every touch.
"You knew last night," she says. The words are level. The level is what tells me how angry she is.
"Yes."
"You knew when you touched me."
"I knew before I touched you. I knew when you crossed the kitchen. I would have known if you'd stayed on the other side of the counter. It doesn't change what I want."
"It changes what I consented to."
The words are precise and surgical, and they cut because she means them to. She's right. She's also wrong, and I'd make the same call again. The information I held back kept her free to choose me without the weight of owing me. I'm not sorry I did it.
"You're right," I say. "It does."