Chapter 7
HARPER
Itell myself it's strictly something to do.
That's how I justify it when Lila asks if I'd like to help her sort through the clinic supplies after breakfast—it's merely something to do, it keeps my hands busy, and it beats sitting alone thinking about everything I'm not ready to piece together yet.
Practical reasons. Sensible reasons. Entirely unrelated to the fact that Lila has a warm, unhurried quality that makes a person want to stay in whatever room she's in.
The clinic is a small room off the back of the lodge—clean and organized in the way that suggests someone with a methodical mindset set it up, and someone else has been slowly undoing that organization over time.
Shelves of labeled supplies, a treatment table along one wall, a cabinet that Lila opens and immediately closes again with a pained expression.
"Declan," she says, by way of explanation.
"What did he do?"
"He reorganized the bandage supplies two weeks ago because he said my system wasn't logical." She opens the cabinet again. Packages of gauze, wound dressings, and medical tape are arranged in a system that appears to follow no discernible logic whatsoever. "This is what he considers logical."
"To be fair," I say, studying it, "I think he might have organized it by color."
Lila stares at it. "He did. He organized medical supplies by color."
"In his defense, it's very visually consistent."
Something passes between us—one second, exactly one—and then we both lose it, and it's the kind of laughing that comes from somewhere genuine and surprised, the kind I haven't done in so long that the feeling is almost unfamiliar.
We work through the morning, restoring Lila's original system—supplies organized by category and frequency of use, expiry dates rotated properly, and everything labeled in a way that could be read under pressure.
It's not so different from the event logistics work I've done for years: the same underlying architecture of what do you need, when do you need it, and where does it live.
My hands know this kind of work and fall into it easily.
"You're good at this," Lila says, watching me reconstruct the cabinet.
"I organized charity galas for five years. The skill set translates more than you'd think."
"What kind of galas?"
"Nonprofit fundraising, mostly. Healthcare initiatives, conservation work, and a few education programs." I hand her a stack of supply packets to check dates on.
"A lot of moving parts, a lot of people who all think their priority is the priority, and a very finite amount of time to make it look effortless. "
Lila laughs softly. "That sounds exhausting."
"It was, sometimes. But I liked it." I pause, because the past tense of that hits differently than I expect it to. Liked. Like it's already something that belongs to a previous version of me. "I'm good at making complicated things run smoothly."
"I can tell." She sets the checked packets in the correct bin with precision, showing she genuinely loves an organized system.
"The group runs some businesses up here.
Forestry, land management. Garrett handles the vehicle fleet that supports all of it—it's more significant than you'd think.
Timber contracts, sustainable harvesting, and land maintenance for some of the conservation parcels in the region. "
"That's a real operation," I say.
"It is. Has been for years." She tilts her head. "Logan built most of it. Took over when he was young and kept building."
I file that away without examining why I find it interesting.
We're finishing up the last shelf when Lila gets pulled away by a radio call from Mateo about a supply order she needs to confirm.
She disappears toward the back office with her notebook, and I find myself standing in a clean, organized clinic with nothing left to sort and the particular restlessness of a person who has been useful and is no longer useful.
I think about my car.
Specifically, I think about the fact that my chapstick is in the center console and my lips have been suffering since yesterday morning, which feels like the kind of small, fixable problem I can actually solve today.
The garage is a long, practical building that I've only seen from the lodge window until now.
I push the side door open and find exactly what I expected—organized, purposeful, the kind of space that belongs entirely to the person who runs it.
A full wall of tools arranged with military precision.
Labeled parts bins on the shelving units.
Eight or nine vehicles in various states, and along the far wall, my car, hood up, a few components laid out on a clean workbench beside it.
Garrett is under something large and diesel nearby. He looks up when I come in, unhurried.
"Chapstick," I say by way of explanation. "Center console."
He nods, as if this is completely reasonable, and goes back to what he's doing.
I find it exactly where I left it, pocket it, and then stand there for a second, looking at my car properly. Hood up, components on the workbench beside it.
"How's it looking?" I ask.
"Part came in." He straightens and wipes his hands on a shop rag. "Getting further into it now. More to assess."
"Good or bad more?"
"Just more." He says it evenly. "Give it some time."
I nod, and then I look around the garage properly. And then, on the workbench along the side wall, an offline laptop is open next to a stack of paper folders, with the particular chaos of a filing system that started with good intentions but ran out of time.
"Are those repair records?" I ask.
Garrett glances at them. "Supposed to be."
"Supposed to be?"
He has the demeanor of a man who is excellent at his actual job but deeply uncomfortable with the administrative side. "I fix things. I'm less good at the paperwork side."
I look at the stack. I look at him. "I organized charity galas for five years," I say. "I can have that sorted in two hours."
He studies me for a moment with those quiet blue eyes, running his calculations. Then he steps back from the workbench and gestures at it with the shop rag. "Have at it."
Two hours turn into two and a half, but by the end of it, there's a functional filing system organized by vehicle, date, and repair type; a spreadsheet on the laptop that cross-references maintenance schedules; and a separate folder flagged for outstanding parts orders.
Garrett checks it over with the focused attention he gives everything mechanical and lands on what I've come to understand is his version of impressed.
"That'll do," he says.
From Garrett, I'm starting to understand, that'll do is effusive.
"You've got three vehicles coming up on service intervals," I tell him, pointing to the flagged column. "Within the next two weeks, if the mileage logs are accurate."
"They're accurate." He leans in and looks at the screen. "Hm."
"Hm good or hm problem?"
"Hm, I should have caught that." He straightens. "Thanks."
I close the laptop and stretch my hands, and I realize—sitting on a shop stool in a mountain garage—that I feel more useful than I have in months.
Maybe longer. The nonprofit work had been good, meaningful even, but the last year of it had been swallowed by Dawson's events and Dawson's schedule and the particular drain of building a life around someone else's priorities without noticing you're doing it.
This afternoon, I built something small and functional that didn't exist before I sat down, and nobody asked me to, and nobody needed me to, and it was mine.
I don't examine that too closely. But I don't dismiss it either.
By the time I've sorted the last folder and closed the laptop, the light coming through the garage windows has gone to the particular gold of early evening. I thank Garrett, who says "hm" in the way I'm learning means something genuinely positive, and head for the door.
I nearly walk directly into Nora on the other side of it.
She catches herself, looks at me, and then looks past me into the garage with open curiosity. "Were you reorganizing Garrett's records?"
"He needed a system."
She stares for a moment like she's recalibrating something. Then she shakes it off, and the decision arrives on her face before she's said a word. "Perfect timing. Dinner's in ten minutes. Come on."
"Oh, I don't want to intrude on—"
"Intrude on what? It's dinner. It happens every night."
"I know, but it's a group thing, and I'm not really—"
"Harper." Nora plants herself in the doorway with the calm, immovable energy of a force that has won arguments with more formidable opposition than me and found none of them particularly challenging.
"You sorted Lila's entire clinic this morning.
You straight up reorganized the filing system that Garrett has been avoiding for six months. You are eating dinner with us."
"Garrett's been avoiding it for six months?"
"That's not the point." She steps aside and gestures up the path toward the lodge with the finality of a conversation that has already been decided, whether I've caught up to that or not. "Ten minutes. Come on."
I open my mouth.
She raises an eyebrow.
"Okay," I say.
The lodge in the evening is a different thing from the lodge in the morning.
The overhead lights are lower, the fire is going properly, and the long table is set with the casual practicality of people who eat together regularly and don't make a ceremony of it.
Mateo and Declan are back from patrol, Mateo looking precisely as composed as he did when he left, and Declan looking like he's been outside all day and enjoyed every second of it.
Lila is already at the table with her notebook.
Garrett arrives exactly at six, washed up, and takes the same seat he probably always takes.
Logan is at the far end.
He's in a clean flannel, sleeves pushed up the way they always seem to be, and he has a glass of water in front of him, and he's listening to something Mateo is saying with the focused, unhurried attention he gives everything.
He looks in my direction when I enter—briefly, purely for a second—and the quality of his stillness shifts in that way it does and then settles.
I sit down across from Lila and tell myself I didn't notice.
Dinner is—it's good. It's genuinely and surprisingly good.
Nora made something with venison that she refuses to call a stew, despite it being clearly a stew; the bread came from somewhere, and nobody will confirm where; and the conversation moves the way conversation moves when people are comfortable enough to let it go anywhere.
Declan tells a story about the patrol that involves a territorial dispute with what he describes as "the most aggressive squirrel I have ever encountered in my professional career," which somehow goes on for four minutes and gets better as it goes.
Lila gently fact-checks him at two points and is cheerfully ignored both times.
Nora and Mateo argue about something related to the southern trail that I don't have enough context to follow but am entertained by regardless.
And through all of it, I sit at this table with people I just met and feel settled. Settled is the right word. Early and unearned and entirely real.
I glance down the table without meaning to and find Logan already looking at me. He doesn't look away. Neither do I, for a beat longer than I should, and then Declan says something that pulls the table's attention, and the moment releases.
I pick up my fork, look at my plate, and think about the car sitting in the garage, being taken apart and assessed, deeper into it than Garrett expected.
And I think, quietly and without much logic, that I'm not sure I'm ready for it to be fixed.
I don't say that out loud. I don't even let myself think it through. But it's there, sitting at the last moments of the evening like the treeline sits at the fringes of the clearing—present and undeniable and closer than it was this morning.
After dinner, when the table is being cleared and the conversation has broken into smaller pieces, Nora drops into the chair beside me and props her chin on her hand.
"You good?" she asks.
I look around the room—Declan making Lila laugh about something, Mateo and Logan talking quietly near the fire, Garrett carrying plates to the kitchen with his usual economy of movement.
"Yeah," I say. And then, more honestly: "I think I might be, actually."
Nora smiles like she already knew that and was merely waiting for me to catch up.