Mace
Four days is a long time in a town with one bar, one general store, and a SAR base across the walkway.
Four days is an eternity when you've decided to avoid someone and Harrow Peak has decided you can't.
Apparently, Dottie told her the SAR team was the only other story worth writing in Harrow Peak, so she swallowed whatever pride I left intact yesterday and walked across the salted walkway with her notebook and her recorder and her city boots.
"The response window," she says, pulling out a stool at the ops table like she belongs there. "For a fall-through on a frozen lake — what's your margin before hypothermia makes extraction a recovery instead of a rescue?"
I stare at her.
"Seven minutes," I say. "In these temperatures. Less if they're submerged."
She writes that down. "And your team covers — what, three counties?"
"Two and a half. County line cuts through the ridge."
"So if you get a call from the far side of the second county, you're already past the window before you arrive."
She's not asking. She's showing me she already worked it out.
I explain the dead reckoning system we use when GPS drops above the tree line, and that leads to the relay protocol, and that leads to the mutual-aid agreement with the county sheriff's department, and twenty minutes later I'm pointing at the topo map on the wall and she's leaning on the ops table writing in handwriting I can't read and I have not told her to leave.
She smells like Dottie's coffee and something else — something warm and sweet under it, vanilla or her skin or both — and it has no business being in this room.
This room smells like gear oil and cold metal and five men who do not moisturize.
She is soft and curved and leaning on my ops table between the radio stack and a pile of carabiners like she was issued with the equipment, and I keep losing my place on the topo map.
Sergeant comes out from under Thane's desk and puts his head in her lap.
Traitor.
She doesn't make a fuss. Just rests her hand between his ears and keeps asking questions. Sergeant's tail sweeps the floor once, twice. He has known this woman for thirty seconds and he is already gone. That makes two of us.
She asks about the team. She asks about the mountain — the geology, the avalanche patterns, the way the weather comes in from the north and hits the peak like a wall. She does not ask what I did before Harrow Peak, which is the question everyone asks eventually.
Her not asking it makes me look at her sideways.
She catches the look. "You'll tell me if you want to."
"I won't."
She shrugs. "Then you won't."
That is all. She doesn't push. She just goes back to her notes and I stand there in the middle of my own operations center trying to remember what I was doing before she showed up.
She makes silence feel like a space you need to fill. So I keep filling it. I talk more in twenty minutes than I've talked to anyone other than Callum in a month.
She leaves at five for dinner with Dottie. They're becoming friends, apparently. This tracks. Dottie collects people. Cleo gets collected.
The door closes behind her and the base is quiet again and I'm standing at the topo map with my hand still raised toward a ridgeline I was explaining and no one left to explain it to.
The room is the same size it was this morning. It does not feel the same size.
Six-thirty. I come up the walkway, and through the Summit's front window I can see the bar is already lit — the low light above the counter, Dottie's early shift.
Standard. What is not standard is the food writer sitting at the far end of the bar in an oversized sweater with her laptop open and a mug of chamomile she's holding with both hands, and my whole body registers her before my brain catches up.
She looks up. Sees me through the glass.
Our eyes hold for one beat. Two. She doesn't wave. She doesn't look away. She just holds my gaze across fifteen feet of frozen walkway with both hands wrapped around that mug like she's daring me to come inside.
I don't.
I stand on the walkway for three full seconds before I remember where I was going.
I have thought about her exactly zero times today. I have also rechecked the weather station twice, reorganized the rope locker for no reason, and snapped at Callum about something that was not his fault. These things are unrelated.
I check the weather station at the eastern lookout every evening. This is routine. I have always done this.
I have not always done this at the exact time a food writer happens to be walking up the lower trail to photograph Harrow Falls in the late light.
She's wearing Dottie's snow boots — enormous, ancient, waterproof to the knee. Several sizes too large. They are deeply unflattering. Cleo is wearing them like they're hers.
I notice this.
The lower trail to the falls is flat and sheltered. Walt ran the snowblower down it this morning. I've already checked the avalanche risk on the upper slopes and it's nowhere near this elevation. The trail is clear.
I fall into step beside her without deciding to.
She doesn't look surprised.
We walk. She talks — not to me, exactly. To the air. Observations about the light on the snow. The way the mountain smells after a storm, like cold metal and pine resin and something underneath both that she says she doesn't have a word for yet. I don't respond. I don't want her to stop.
I am watching her and I know I'm watching her.
The way she moves through the snow in those ridiculous boots — steady, unhurried, hips shifting under the heavy coat with every step.
Her dark hair against all that white. The flush the cold puts on her throat.
I track details for a living — avalanche cracks, ice stress, the way a ridgeline shifts before a slide.
Every detail I'm tracking right now is her.
At the falls, she gets her photograph. Harrow Falls in late winter — half-frozen, great curtains of blue-white ice locked mid-fall, the water beneath groaning through the dark.
She holds her phone up and takes three shots and then stands there looking at it like she's composing the caption in her head.
She turns around and I'm closer than she expected.
She doesn't step back. My boots don't move. The cold air between us shrinks to nothing.
Her face is flushed from the cold. Her breath fogs between us. She is looking up at me with an expression I can't name. I don't try.
"You're not what I thought you were," I say.
"What did you think I was?"
"Someone who'd leave when I told her to."
"I never leave when I'm told to."
I kiss her.
Not tentative. But careful — deliberate in a way that surprises me, my hand at the side of her jaw, my thumb against her cheekbone, like I'm making sure she knows this is not an accident.
She kisses me back. Thorough. Unhesitating. Her fingers curl into the front of my jacket and pull, and my whole chest goes tight.
Behind us, the falls groan. Ice shifts against rock. The sound fills the canyon.
I have been moving since I was eighteen. Through doors, through countries, through every room and relationship and deployment at a speed that meant nothing ever settled long enough to stick.
This is the first time in my life I want to stay exactly where I am.
My hands are shaking. Not from the cold. This woman just stopped me in a canyon with her fingers in my jacket and every instinct I have says move and I am standing here choosing her over all of them. That should send me running. It doesn't.
I pull back just far enough to see her face.
Her eyes are dark. Her hand is still fisted in the front of my jacket, knuckles white, like she's holding on to something she hasn't decided to let go of.
I can taste her — coffee and cold air and something warm underneath both — and my thumb is still on her cheekbone and I am not moving it.
I am not moving anything. The whole mountain could come down right now and I would die at this exact distance from her mouth.
She says, "That was —"
"Yeah."
"Okay." She breathes. "Okay."
The light is going. The trail back is easy and we walk it without talking, close enough that our arms brush with every step, and the silence is not empty. It's full. It's the fullest silence I've ever been inside.
I know something, walking down that trail. I know it the way I know weather patterns and ridgelines and the sound the mountain makes before it moves.
I'm not letting her drive down that road without a reason to come back.
I don't know what that looks like yet. I don't have a plan. Plans are not my strong suit — I'm the one who goes through the door before he's supposed to, before the order comes, before the way is clear.
But I know it. Settled and certain. Like a coordinate locked on a map.
Yesterday she asked me what I did before Harrow Peak, and I said I won't tell you. I meant it when I said it. I have kept that door shut for every person who has tried to open it since I came to this mountain.
I'm going to have to open it for her. I know that now. If I want her to stay, I have to give her something worth staying for.
She's not leaving this mountain without knowing what she's leaving.