Slade
Dottie's text comes at ten to six. Woman named Piper checked in. Asked if you were in town. Said she was Owen's sister.
I read it twice. Set my phone on the kitchen counter. Pick it up again.
Two months since I walked back into the Summit with one bag and four brothers who didn't ask where I'd been. Six weeks on the SAR team — Dax put in the word. I've been relearning the mountain and trying to earn my way into a life that fits.
Fourteen months of knowing her name, knowing her face from Owen's photographs, carrying every story he told about her until I could tell them myself. Fourteen months of not calling. Of not being the man who could say it out loud.
I check the sky before I lock the door — habit. The rest of me is on fire. High cirrus from the west, thin and moving slow. Weather holds through tomorrow. None of this matters right now. I check anyway.
My cabin to the Summit takes eight minutes through August air that smells like dry pine and warm rock. The peak is going gold above the treeline — that last-light color that only happens at altitude, that Owen wrote about in his notebook without ever seeing it in person.
She is on the porch.
I stop. One bag on the porch step beside her. She's holding a notebook — his, I recognize the cover — and she's looking at the mountain.
Owen talked about his sister the way he talked about everything that mattered — without decoration. Dark-eyed and stubborn and smarter than him — he'd be the first to say it. A trauma nurse who was terrible at making coffee and the best person he knew.
And then she shifts her weight on the porch step — hips, waist, the full curve of her in the evening light — and everything I've been telling myself goes quiet.
Her mouth. Full lower lip, pressed together while she reads from the notebook. I shouldn't be looking at her mouth.
Eight feet of porch between us and my pulse kicks hard against my throat.
"Piper."
She turns. Dark eyes — Owen's eyes, and nothing like Owen's eyes. They move over me once — fast, involuntary — and come back to my face. Her breath catches.
"You must be Slade."
"Yes."
"He talked about you all the time." She studies me — openly, unhurried. She's already decided she has a right to. "Every Sunday call, last year of his enlistment. You and this mountain."
"He talked about you too."
Something crosses my face. I feel it — the slip I can't catch in time — because talked about you doesn't begin to cover it. Owen said her name three times on a mountain I will never name. Twice when he was lucid. Once at the end.
Her chin lifts a fraction. She caught it. Whatever she saw, she tucks away.
"He didn't hand out his loyalty to just anyone," she says. "It was a short list. And he never once shut up about this place." She half-smiles. "I came to see it for myself. And to meet the people he would have brought me to meet."
She has no idea what that costs me. That I've been carrying her brother's last forty minutes like shrapnel in my chest. That she's standing three feet away from the man whose hands Owen was in at the end, and she doesn't know it yet.
I hold the door.
She steps past me. Her arm brushes mine. My grip tightens on the door frame.
She came here for Owen — for the mountain, the stories, the notebook. I will give her every piece of it. Every memory. Every trail he wanted to walk. Everything I've been holding that belongs to her.
And when she has enough, I will tell her the rest. What I was doing on that mountain. Whose hands he was in at the end.
I owe them both that much.
She goes inside. The door swings shut behind her and the porch still smells like warm skin and something that isn't pine.
I take one breath. Then I follow.