Chapter 9
HARPER
The next day, I find the landline during lunch.
It's mounted on the wall near the kitchen pass-through, the kind of old corded phone that looks like it has been in exactly that spot for twenty years and has no intention of moving.
I've walked past it four times since yesterday, and each time I've kept walking, which I've been telling myself is because the timing wasn't right and not because I'm avoiding it.
Today I stop.
The lodge is busy in the comfortable, overlapping way it gets at midday—Nora moving around the kitchen, Declan somewhere down the table arguing cheerfully with himself about something, and Lila writing in her notebook, entirely undisturbed by all of it, which is simply how Lila works.
Nobody is paying attention to me, which is either a coincidence or kindness, and at this point, I'm not sure there's a difference with these people.
I pick up the handset.
The dial tone is immediate and steady. Real. I hold it against my ear and look at the wall and think about who I'm calling and what I'm going to say and in what order.
My mother first. That's the responsible call.
She's been worried for two days—though knowing her, the worry comes layered.
Worried that I'm hurt, yes. Worried about what people are saying, and also yes, running alongside the first at roughly the same volume.
I can picture her exactly—sitting at the kitchen table with her phone face-up in front of her, already drafting the version of events she'll tell at her next lunch, trying to find the framing that preserves the family's dignity while her daughter is missing somewhere in the mountains.
I love her. It's simply best described as complicated.
I start to dial.
I get through four digits before I stop.
Because the moment I make this call, the quiet ends.
The moment someone in my world knows where I am—even my mother, who loves me and who would never intentionally—the information starts moving.
It gets to the wrong person or the right person at the wrong time, and suddenly there are questions I don't have answers to yet and decisions I haven't made and a version of events I haven't had the chance to construct for myself.
My mother will want to know what happened. And then she'll want to know what the plan is. And then she'll want to know what I'm going to say publicly, because my mother has never once in her life separated those two questions.
I set the handset back in the cradle.
Not yet. I'm not ready yet.
I stand there for a moment looking at the phone, and then I think about the two days of headlines and statements and whatever machine Dawson has been running in my absence.
I've been completely insulated from it by geography.
Part of me has been grateful for that. Part of me knows I can't stay insulated forever.
I find Lila in the clinic doing inventory and knock on the open door. "Is there any internet up here? A computer I can use?"
She looks up from her clipboard. "No Wi-Fi, the signal doesn't reach.
We use a private satellite network for our phones, but standard cell service is dead up here.
But the pack office off the main room has a laptop hardwired to a satellite dish.
It's slow, but it works." She tilts her head, reading something in my features. "Help yourself."
"Are you sure? I don't want to—"
"I'm going to be in here for the next hour at least." She waves a hand toward the door. "Go ahead."
She nods and goes back to her clipboard, and I head back out to the lodge.
I sit down at the desk in the pack office and wake up the hardwired laptop. I stare at the open browser for a moment longer than necessary. I've known this computer and the landline were here for days. I just hadn't been ready to plug back into the world until now.
Then I type my own name into the search bar.
The results load immediately, and there are a lot of them.
Bride Vanishes Hours Before Ceremony — Whitaker Wedding Scandal Grows
Harper Collins: Breakdown or Runaway? Sources Close to Developer Speak Out
Dawson Whitaker Breaks Silence on Missing Fiancée
I click the last one first, because I am practical even when I don't want to be, and practical means starting with the thing that's going to be the worst.
It's a video. A press statement, formal and composed, showed Dawson in a charcoal suit standing in what appears to be the lobby of one of his buildings.
He looks concerned. That's the performance he's chosen, and he's good at it.
Concerned and slightly pained, Dawson is being very gracious about a difficult situation, which is a thing Dawson is extremely good at performing.
"Harper has been under significant stress in the lead-up to the wedding," he tells the camera, his voice measured and careful. "I believe the pressure became overwhelming, and she needed to step away. I'm not angry. I'm worried about her well-being, and I hope she reaches out when she's ready."
I watch it twice.
The second time, I pay attention to what he doesn't say.
He doesn't say I love her. He doesn't say something happened between us.
He says stress and pressure and overwhelming—words that are technically neutral and functionally not, words that build a picture of a woman who couldn't handle her own life, who panicked, who ran.
Not a woman who walked into a private room and found her fiancé kissing someone else—hands on her face, eyes closed, completely absorbed—while two hundred guests waited downstairs for a ceremony that was never going to happen.
Not a woman who scrolled through eight months of messages on a phone that wasn't hers.
Nothing more than a woman who panicked.
I close the laptop harder than I mean to. Too angry to fully execute anything.
For a moment, I sit there, looking at the fire.
There's a particular kind of anger that doesn't run hot—it runs cold and flat and very clear, and that's what's moving through me right now.
This anger has had time to settle into itself.
Two days of mountain quiet, and now I can see the full shape of what was done to me—and that particular kind of anger runs considerably deeper than the immediate kind.
He knew exactly what he was doing when he stood in front of that camera. He always knows exactly what he's doing.
I push back from the table before I've consciously decided to move, and I go find Logan. I need to vent, and I know he’ll listen.
I find him splitting wood near the clearing’s boundary, working with the unhurried efficiency of someone doing a routine task. He looks up when he hears me coming, reads whatever is on my face, and sets the axe down before I've said a word.
"What happened?" he asks.
"He did a press statement." I stop a few feet away and cross my arms. "Dawson. He went on camera and told the world I had a breakdown from wedding stress and wandered off." I pause. "Those aren't his exact words. His exact words were more careful than that. But that's the story he's building."
Logan's face stays even. "What actually happened? Before you left."
I look at him for a second. It's a direct question, and he's asking it directly, which is so different from how the people in my world operate that it takes me a beat to catch up to it.
"I went looking for him before the ceremony," I tell him.
"He wasn't where he was supposed to be. I found him in one of the private rooms in the east wing.
" I pause. "He was kissing one of his colleagues.
I took his phone. There were eight months of messages.
The affair started two months after we got engaged. "
Logan is very still.
"And he's on camera," I continue, "looking incredibly reasonable, telling everyone I panicked under pressure.
" I feel the edge in my own voice and don't try to smooth it down.
"He never mentions catching him. Never mentions a reason.
Just pressure and stress and Harper, overwhelmed, unable to handle her own wedding. "
"He's controlling the story," Logan replies. It isn't a question.
"He's been controlling everything for five years.
Why would today be different?" I press two fingers to my sternum and breathe through the pressure there.
"There are articles. A lot of them. Some are reporting what he said, some are speculating, and one of them—" I stop.
"One of them has a headline questioning whether I have a history of instability.
Which I don't. I've never—" I stop again.
"I know," Logan replies quietly.
"The worst part is that it works," I continue, because now that it's moving, it wants to keep moving.
"If I surface right now and try to tell my side, I'm the unstable runaway bride contradicting her very reasonable, very concerned ex-fiancé, who only wants to make sure she's okay.
I have the screenshots. I have the proof.
But if I drop them now without a strategy, it just becomes a messy, ugly tabloid war.
" The treeline is a neutral surface, and I use it.
"My own mother is going to call me, and the first thing she asks, after ‘are you safe’, is going to be ‘what are we going to do about this?
' She loves me. She does. But everything in that world becomes about how it looks before it becomes about what it is—she was wired that way before I was born, and so was everyone around her. "
Logan lets that settle for a moment before he replies. "How much coverage is there?"
"Enough. It's been two days, and it's already moved past local news.
" I exhale. "And if I go back to my real life right now, even with the proof, I don't have a single answer for what comes next.
I don't know what I want to say, I don't have a plan, and I'm not ready to walk back into that world and figure it out under a microscope. "
"Then you don't," he replies plainly. "I can get you out of the mountains quietly when you're ready—back roads, nothing public. But there's no reason to move before you have what you need." He meets my eyes. "The word, and we go. Whenever that is."
I look at him—this man who keeps handing me options instead of decisions, who keeps asking what I want instead of telling me what makes sense—and feel the particular disorientation of not being managed.
"I don't want to go back yet," I admit. The words come out quieter than I intend them to.
"Not to any of it. Not to my mother's questions or the articles or Dawson's press statement or the version of events everyone is building without me.
" I pause. "I need time. Real time, away from all of it, before I walk back in and execute my response.
When I drop those screenshots, there is no going back. "
"That's not the same as hiding," Logan replies evenly.
"I know." The mountains surrounding the clearing have no opinion about Dawson Whitaker's charcoal suit or his careful, concerned expression, which is exactly what I need from them right now.
"I need to figure out what I actually think before everyone else tells me what to think.
I've never had that. Space to land somewhere before the next thing starts. "
Logan immediately has no words. "Then take it," he replies simply. "There's no deadline on getting your bearings."
"It might look worse," I tell him. "The longer I'm away from my real life—"
"It might," he agrees, and the honesty of it is more steadying than any reassurance would be. "But walking back in before you're ready will also look like something. Only you know which one you can live with."
I'm quiet for a moment, turning that over.
"I'm not sad," I tell him, and I mean it. "That's the thing I keep coming back to. I found him kissing someone else the morning of our wedding, and I should be devastated, and mostly I feel—" I search for the word. "Clarified."
His eyes linger on me for a long moment. "That's not nothing," he replies finally. "That's you knowing what was real and what wasn't."
I exhale slowly.
"I need some time," I tell him again, more to myself than to him. "Before I go back and become the story. Before everyone gets to have an opinion about what I should do next." I straighten up. "That's all I know right now."
"That's enough to know," Logan replies.
He picks the ax back up. I understand that means the conversation is settled and he's not going to make a production of it, which is exactly right.
I stand there for another moment, and I think about Dawson's reasonable voice on camera, and the eight months of messages, and my mother already composing her response to the situation, and all the people in that orbit waiting for me to surface so they can have a position on it.
And then I think about the mountains, and the quiet, and the particular relief of being somewhere that none of that has reached yet.
I'm not ready to give that up.
Not today.