Chapter 4 #2
The grin fades only so slightly. “She’d do it for me,” he says simply.
“But that’s why you’re here now to help out.
” Then he straightens off the frame and knocks twice on the double doors, brisk again.
“Go on in. Several bedrooms, take your pick, but Eve’s room is in the left wing, so I’d go right.
Total privacy, and the far room has a view of the waterfall through the trees.
” He’s already backing away along the gallery.
“Rest that bandaged hand. I’ll come bang the pans around in a few hours and feed you something unforgettable. ”
I chuckle and hug him. “Thanks, Ethan.”
“Welcome home.” And he leaves, heading downstairs.
So I step inside and shut the door behind me, where I find a small stone fireplace with the kindling already laid.
Shelves of the old paperbacks with their cracked spines, the exact ones, I’d swear to it.
Down the hall, a kitchen that’s lovely without showing off, timber cabinets, a farmhouse sink under a window full of green, a kettle on the stove, and mugs hanging on hooks.
The hallway splits into wings, and I go right, past one door, then another, to the room at the end, and push it open.
Oh.
Log walls the color of dark honey. Beams low and close overhead, with a wide bed and a carved headboard.
It’s covered in charcoal linen, fur throws tumbled across the foot, soft enough that my fingers itch from the doorway.
Lanterns hang from the beams, iron and glass, and there’s a stone fireplace right in the bedroom.
The windows pull the forest’s green light inside.
“This is perfect.” I drop my backpack at the foot of the bed and spot the glass door in the corner. The balcony.
Outside, the air is cool silk. The forest stands close enough that I could lean over the railing and touch the nearest boughs. Between two of them, far off through a notch in the ridge, a thin white thread of falling water catches the sun. The waterfall, and Ethan wasn’t exaggerating.
I sink into the balcony chair and breathe it all the way to the bottom of my lungs, and for the first time in five years, I can inhale completely.
God, I’ve missed this place. These woods are the only ground that ever held still under me, and after Miami chewed up my job, my apartment, and my carefully laminated five-year plan, this is exactly where I want to be.
I pull out my phone to send Grandma a photo of the view, and that’s my mistake, because the gallery opens on the last picture I looked at, three nights ago at two in the morning.
Jerry. He’s laughing in the photo, head tipped back, sawdust in his dark hair, my terribly knitted scarf around his neck because he wore it everywhere just to make me crazy. Twenty-three years old forever, standing in front of the old woodshed that probably doesn’t exist anymore.
He came to the lodge the summer I turned eighteen.
One of the first men Grandma ever took through the program, back when the whole county told her she was insane to house convicts on her land, and he was proof that she was right.
Gentle and funny and so determined to earn his way clean that he worked himself to the bone.
Everyone told me not to fall for a man working off his sentence at my grandmother’s lodge.
And they were right, yet I would do every hour of it again.
Six months after we got together, the woods took him back. A freak accident, everyone kept calling it, as if the words would help. He was clearing deadfall alone on a calm, windless morning, and a pine that had been struck by lightning the night before chose that hour to come down.
Tears sting my eyes, and I press my thumb to the edge of the screen like I could touch his jaw through it.
“I can hear you even now,” I whisper. “You know that?”
Stop looking in the past, Lucy. Go forward.
Live your life. He started saying it our first month together, once he’d pulled the whole sad story out of me—the parents who left me on Grandma’s porch to never be seen again.
The girl not even her own parents wanted.
He’d take my face in both hands when I spiraled and say it slowly, like a spell. Forward. Live.
Then he left too. The only one who never meant to, and somehow that made it worse.
The bond didn’t care that it was an accident.
When your Alpha dies, the bond dies screaming, and it drags the body down with it.
Bond sickness, the clinics wrote on their neat forms, while I shook and burned and couldn’t keep food down for weeks.
Months of clinics, two towns away. Months of Grandma sleeping upright in vinyl chairs, holding my hand through the worst of it, and none of it helped.
That wasn’t her fault, but grief doesn’t hand out fault fairly.
Every trail here reminded me of him, and I couldn’t stand to look at the place where his second chance had ended.
So as soon as I could walk a straight line again, I left the lodge, left Rusty’s Bend, left the whole state, and I called it a career. That was five years ago.
We weren’t even scent matches, Jerry and I.
“I miss you,” I whisper.
Wind moves through the pines. Somewhere out in the green, a branch lets go and falls, and I flinch.
For five years, I couldn’t imagine standing on this mountain without drowning.
But right now, with his photo in my hand and the woods breathing all around me, I’m surviving and feel as though I belong here again.
Maybe that’s you, I tell him silently. That’s just time. Either way, I’m trying. I flew two thousand miles and got bitten by a stranger, but I’m trying.
I wipe my face and stroll inside to find a washcloth. So I push the bathroom door open and stop dead for the fifth time today.
“Are you kidding me?” Slate underfoot, log walls glowing under two more lanterns, a long timber vanity with a hammered copper basin.
And under its own window, with the pines crowding green right up against the glass, is a freestanding copper tub.
Deep enough to disappear in. Fat white towels sit stacked on a bench, and on the shelf, there’s a row of jars with Grandma’s handwriting on the labels—lavender, pine salt, oat milk—stocked for whoever needs them, and tonight that is emphatically me.
“Yes,” I inform the tub. “Absolutely yes.”
I quickly go to lock the private sector door, then the bedroom one too.
I get the taps running hot and shake half a jar of lavender salt into the water.
While the tub slowly fills, I peel off my clothes, pin up my hair, and ache for a soak.
Steam climbs the window glass and blurs the pines into a soft green haze.
I light the candle on the little wooden tray because if I’m doing this, I’m doing it properly.
It takes ages to fill, and I stand there, hugging a towel and watching the water rise, and think about nothing at all, which is a luxury I’d forgotten existed.
When it’s finally deep enough, I sink up to my chin. The heat takes every knot in my body and starts undoing them one by one.
Ever since I left these woods, my life has come apart one careful piece at a time. Alpha. Health. Job. Apartment. Like the universe took my leaving personally and has spent five years sending me the bill.
Well, I’m done fighting it. “I’m back, universe. You win. I’m home, and the forest can have me.”
Now leave me alone.