Nell
Ridge Road clears late afternoon and everything happens fast.
The radio crackles. Thane listens, nods once, and tells me. His voice is level. Practical. He's already moving — packing the supply kit, checking the stove, retreating into usefulness. I know that mode. I watched him slip into it yesterday morning over coffee.
This time he's not coming back out.
I start packing. He helps, because of course he does — efficient, methodical, handing me my jacket without meeting my eyes. Every movement says this part is over and we are now returning to the regularly scheduled program. And I am not going to let him do that.
"You're doing the thing," I say.
He stops. "What thing."
"Deciding this doesn't count. That it was just the storm."
The silence stretches heavy between us. He doesn't deny it.
I'm not devastated. I'm frustrated. Because he held me on that rug like I was the only thing that mattered, and now he's choosing to treat it as a weather event.
"I told you I leave places." My voice is steadier than I expected. "I didn't tell you that you weren't worth coming back for."
Nothing. His hands still on the pack strap. But his jaw shifts — one muscle, small and involuntary — and I watch the accusation land somewhere he can't pack up and put away.
I pick up my bag. Outside in the snow, I wait — because I cannot actually storm off a mountain I don't know at ten thousand feet. I just delivered a perfectly good exit line and now I need him to walk me home.
Infuriating.
He comes out. Takes the lead without a word. I follow, and I don't argue him into wanting something he's decided not to want.
We hike down in a brittle silence. Every step feels like something being agreed to without words. He sets the pace. I keep up.
The mountain is extraordinary in the clear post-storm light — every ridge sharp, the sky scrubbed clean, beautiful enough to make my chest ache. I resent it slightly.
My car is where I left it two days ago. I stop at Prentiss General — pay Walt for the extra nights, collect my bag. He gives me a look over the counter that says he already knows. I don't explain.
I drive.
Ridge Road switchbacks down through the pines. I take each turn carefully, and at the clearing point — where the last sight of Harrow Peak disappears above the treeline — I pull over.
I crouch in the cold and start wrestling the chains off my tires.
It is undignified. The cold metal bites straight through my gloves, sharp enough to make me hiss. My hands are clumsy and aching and I keep working because I need something to do with them right now. My knuckles are raw by the time I get the first one loose.
I sit back on my heels. Harrow Peak is still visible from here. My fingers are numb. I stay crouched by the tire longer than strictly necessary.
I was going to come back.
Before the kiss, before the rug, before he said my name like it meant something. I was going to come back for this place because that's what I do — I find things and I leave and then I come back for the ones that matter.
He doesn't know that.
I should get up. I should put the chains in the trunk, get in the car, and drive.
I'm still crouching in the snow holding a set of snow chains when headlights come down the road behind me.