One Night with the Mountain Man (Second Chances in Silver Ridge #2)

1. Mila

one

Mila

The drive takes eight hours, and Macie sleeps through most of it, which feels like a gift from a universe that has not historically been generous with me.

I stop twice — once for gas and a coffee that tastes like motor oil, once because Macie wakes up screaming “snack snack snack” with a ferocity that suggests she has never once in her life been fed.

I give her the apple slices I packed, and she eats four of them, which I take as a sign that she's fine and I should keep driving.

The mountains come into view around hour six.

I've been watching for them without meaning to — the way you watch for something you're not sure you want to see.

They rise out of the flat highway scrub like they've always been there, which they have.

Tall and grey and permanent. The kind of landscape that makes your own problems feel very small and very large at the same time.

Silver Ridge.

I've been rehearsing what I'm going to say for three weeks. I have different versions, ranging from I think you should know to here is your daughter, please don't be a bad person. None of them sound right. All of them are true.

The festival grounds are on the north end of town, in a wide clearing between the tree line and the river.

I know this because I looked it up obsessively in the weeks before I drove here, cross-referencing the town's events calendar with every piece of festival information I could find.

The Silver Ridge Timber Festival. Running since 1962.

Competition events coordinated by a man whose name I didn't find anywhere, but whose face I have not forgotten in three years.

I pull into the parking area at half past noon on Thursday, which is opening day. The lot is filling up — trucks, mostly, with a few minivans and one very ambitious RV that someone has parked sideways across two spaces.

There's a banner stretched between two fir trees at the entrance: SILVER RIDGE TIMBER FESTIVAL — 63RD ANNUAL. Below that, two men in vests direct foot traffic with the focused energy of people who have a very specific role and intend to fulfill it.

I sit in the car for a moment.

Macie kicks the back of my seat. "Out," she says. "Mama. Out."

"I know."

"Out now."

"Give me one second."

She considers this. "No."

I love her so much. She is also, genuinely, the most relentless person I have ever met, and I have been her sole parent for two years. I know that any second she is going to escalate from out to a sound that can strip paint off a wall. I get out of the car.

She reaches for me immediately, arms up, that complete toddler faith that someone will catch her. I lift her onto my hip, and she grabs a fistful of my hair. I pry it loose with two fingers and she laughs.

"Party!" she says, looking at the banner.

"Festival, yeah."

She squirms until I set her down, and then she takes off at that dangerous toddler pace — not quite fast enough to be a real problem, fast enough that I have to stay close.

I grab her hand and she pulls against it without breaking stride, which is her preferred mode of locomotion. I steer us toward the entrance.

The festival grounds smell like sawdust and woodsmoke and something frying at one of the food vendors.

There's a main stage at the south end and the competition grounds to the north — I can see the log-rolling pool from here, a long rectangular tank of dark water with a log floating in it.

Beyond that, what looks like the axe-throwing range.

Beyond that, the chainsaw carving area, where a man in ear protection is already working and a small crowd has gathered to watch.

I scan the grounds.

He's tall. I remember that. Broad through the shoulders.

Dark hair, or light-dark, the kind that could go either way in the memory.

He laughed easily. He had a way of standing that made the space around him feel calm, like weather moving around a mountain.

I spent one night with him and I've spent three years with the shape of him in my peripheral vision every time I look at my daughter.

Macie spots the log-rolling pool and makes a break for it.

"Hey — no!" I catch her around the middle and she goes stiff with outrage. "That's water, sweetheart. Not for us."

"Want water."

"I know you want water. We're going to look, okay? We're going to walk around and look."

She thinks about this. "And snacks?"

"If we find some, yes."

She relaxes in my arms, satisfied. I carry her toward the competition area because the crowd is thinner there and I can see more of the grounds from the elevated viewing platform to one side.

The platform is wooden, temporary, bolted together for the week.

I climb the three steps and Macie grabs the railing and leans out over it, pointing at the log in the pool below.

"Log," she announces to nobody in particular.

"That's right."

"Big log."

"Big log."

"Biggest log." She looks at me for confirmation.

"Probably the biggest log," I agree.

She nods, satisfied, and then looks back at the grounds. And I do too. I'm watching the festival staff — the people moving with purpose, the ones carrying clipboards or wearing lanyards or directing competitors toward the staging area.

One of the vested men from the entrance is talking to a group near the axe range. Two women are setting up a judging table near the log-rolling pool. And a man is coming around the corner of the staging tent on the far side of the competition grounds.

He's tall. Broad through the shoulders. Dark hair, just a bit long, curling at the back of his neck. He's wearing a grey shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows and he has a lanyard and a radio clipped to his belt.

It's HIM.

I know it before my brain finishes the confirmation, the way you know certain things in the body before the mind catches up.

The same man who sat across from me at a picnic table three years ago and smiled and made me feel, for the first time in months, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

He's thirty feet away. Maybe thirty-five.

He looks up, scanning the grounds, doing whatever a festival coordinator does when he needs to see the whole picture at once. His gaze sweeps the platform.

It stops.

Thirty feet away, he goes still.

I watch him see me. I watch the recognition move through his face — the way it changes from professional assessment to something else, something much older and much more specific. He knows me. Three years and a different life, but he knows me the same way I know him.

Then his gaze drops to Macie.

She's still leaning on the railing, pointing at the log, narrating her observations to anyone who will listen. Dark hair, same dark-light shade as his. Stubborn jaw, she got from somewhere that was not me. His eyes — that exact particular grey-green, the color of river water in shade.

He looks at her. He looks at me. He looks at her again.

I don't move. I don't look away. I stand there with Macie on the railing between my hands and I let him look, because this is the moment I drove eight hours for.

This is the thing I've been rehearsing. I was wrong that it would be hard to find him — he was the first person I saw.

I was wrong that I'd feel afraid. What I feel is something I don't have a clean word for.

Like standing at the edge of something enormous and knowing you're about to step off.

"Mama," Macie says, "look. Log."

"I see it."

She twists to look up at me, then follows my gaze to the man standing on the competition grounds below us. She studies him with the frank, comprehensive assessment of a two-year-old. He is large and interesting and he is looking at us. This is enough information.

"Hi," she calls to him.

He doesn't answer. He's still doing the math.

His jaw tightens. He takes one breath in, slow and measured.

Then he starts walking toward us.

I don't run. I tighten my grip on the railing for exactly one second, then let go, because I am not the woman who runs anymore. I drove eight hours to see him.