Cleo
Two months later, and the piece ran.
Not just ran. The Summit Bar & Grill profile was fast-tracked for the summer cover, syndicated nationally within the month, and picked up by a national editor who has now called twice about a standing feature. Marcus called it the best thing I'd written in two years.
He also said it read like a love letter.
I said, "It's a profile."
He said, "It's a love letter, Cleo."
I didn't argue. He wasn't wrong.
I'm back in Harrow Peak. I've been back twice since February, each time with a bigger bag and a shorter list of reasons to leave. This time I brought more than a weekend's worth of clothes and a bottle of wine for Dottie that she'll pretend to be surprised by and open immediately.
I'm not moving. I still have an apartment.
I still have a city and a career that requires occasionally being in rooms with Wi-Fi and editors who want to have lunch.
But I have a drawer at Mace's cabin now, and a mug at the Summit with my name on it in Dottie's handwriting, which in Harrow Peak is basically a deed of ownership.
I pull into the gravel lot and the mountain is doing what it always does — filling the sky, indifferent and enormous, daring you to look away. I don't look away. I haven't since the first time.
Mace is at the SAR base. I can see his truck. I grab my bag, cross the walkway — salted, because Walt is Walt — and push through the door.
He's on the radio, arguing with someone about snowpack data in a voice that carries through walls. He sees me, raises one hand without breaking stride in the argument, and goes right back to it.
This is his version of a welcome. He's getting better at the words. Slowly.
I pull off my gloves. I look at the whiteboard.
Mountain conditions — updated this morning. Missing persons column — empty, which is good. And below that, in Mace's handwriting — heavy, slightly crooked, unmistakably his:
C: arrives today.
He wrote it himself. In front of the whole team.
I stare at it. My throat tightens. My initial on the whiteboard, and he wanted it there where everyone could see it.
Mace ends the radio call. The room goes quiet.
He looks at me across the ops table with that direct, unfiltered look I haven't gotten used to and suspect I never will — the one that says he saw me before I was through the door and he has been waiting since he wrote my letter on that board this morning.
He crosses the room in four strides and kisses me before I can say a word. His hand in my hair. His mouth sure and warm and unhurried, like a man who finally knows exactly where he's standing.
When he pulls back I say, "Hi."
"Hi."
"I love you," I say. No preamble.
He looks at me. His hand is still in my hair. "I know."
I raise an eyebrow.
"I love you," he says. Rough. Real. "I knew before you left. I was getting there."
"You were getting there."
"I got there."
I laugh and he keeps his hand where it is and outside the window the mountain is doing what it does — indifferent, magnificent, permanent — and I am standing in a converted firehouse at nine thousand feet with a man who cleared the snow off my car before dawn and chased me down a highway and put my initial on the whiteboard where his whole team could see it.
Harrow Peak is exactly my kind of place.