Chapter 2
RIDGE
She shouldn’t have been on that ridge.
Nobody should have been on that ridge. It wasn’t a trail.
It wasn’t even a route. The stretch she’d been crossing when she fell was exposed rock I’d flagged as hazardous two years ago, back when Evan and Dash and I were still scouting the upper elevations together.
We’d marked it on our internal maps with a red X and a short, clear note.
Unstable scree. No go.
And then I watched a woman in borrowed hiking boots with a half-full water bottle try to cross it alone.
I’d been checking the tree line along the upper ridge when I heard the slide. Loose rock cascading. A sharp, brittle sound that sliced through the quiet. Then nothing. No scream. No cry for help. Just the settling silence that follows a fall.
That silence is always worse.
I found her wedged against a downed hemlock, sitting upright, conscious. Her ankle was already swelling inside a boot that didn’t fit her right. She looked up at me with an expression that was equal parts pain and defiance—like she was daring the mountain to try again.
Something shifted in me.
I hadn’t spoken to anyone in three weeks.
Not my business partners, Evan and Dash.
Not the cashier at the gas station where I filled up my truck on supply runs.
No one. I’d been living inside the quiet of my cabin, splitting wood, checking trails nobody used, eating meals I couldn’t taste, and convincing myself that numbness was the same thing as peace.
Seven months ago, I’d been guiding a sunset hike on the Thornberry ridgeline. Small group. Easy terrain. A woman in her fifties stepped twenty feet off the marked path to photograph a view.
The ground gave way.
She fell nearly forty feet down a rock face. Shattered pelvis. Wrist. Three ribs. I got to her in under a minute, stabilized her, called for rescue. She survived. She recovered.
But the sound she made when she fell—that sharp, startled cry that cut off the moment she hit—I hear it every day.
In the shower.
While splitting wood.
In the silence between one thought and the next.
I hear it. I see her face. I feel the ground give way under my own boots all over again, because I was the one who chose that trail. I was the one who said the conditions were safe.
I was wrong.
After that, I pulled back. Told Evan and Dash I needed time. Stopped coming to town. Stopped running tours. Moved higher up the mountain to the property I owned—the cabin I’d built over two summers, back when I still believed that building something solid was enough to make a life.
They let me go.
Evan tried twice to bring me back. Dash left a six-pack on my porch with a note that read, Whenever you’re ready.
I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure I ever would be.
And now there was a woman on my couch with an ice pack strapped to her ankle and that same stubborn set to her jaw. She was using my landline—because there’s no cell signal worth a damn up here—and I stood in the kitchen doorway pretending I wasn’t watching her.
Her name was Brooklyn. She was in town with friends for the Wildflower Festival. She’d been chasing a rare orchid along a ridgeline that should’ve been blocked off. She fell because the scree field I’d flagged two years ago still hadn’t been marked.
I should’ve been angry.
At Bobbi, for sending inexperienced hikers into terrain they weren’t equipped for.
At the festival, for turning the mountain into a scavenger hunt.
At myself, for staying up here instead of making sure the north ridge was properly blocked off.
But I wasn’t angry.
I was standing in my kitchen, listening to Brooklyn tell someone named Hartley that she was fine—that a guy from the mountain had found her, that her ankle was sprained but she could still wiggle her toes—and something about the sound of another person’s voice in my house was doing things to me I hadn’t felt in months.
“She wants to know if you’re a serial killer,” Brooklyn called from the couch.
I leaned my shoulder against the doorframe. “Tell her I haven’t decided yet.”
She relayed it. I heard laughter through the receiver. Brooklyn’s mouth twitched—the first thing close to a smile I’d seen since I’d picked her up off that slope.
She was pretty. I’d noticed that on the ridge, which was inconvenient timing given the circumstances.
Dark hair pulled loose from whatever she’d tried to tie it into, falling around her face in a way that looked accidental and probably wasn’t.
Brown eyes. A mouth built for expressions that made people pay attention.
But it wasn’t her face that cracked something in me. It was the way she’d sat there on that unstable rock, ankle swelling, loose scree shifting beneath her, and looked up at me like she was irritated at the mountain for interrupting her plans.
No panic. No tears. Just a woman who’d gotten herself into trouble and was already calculating how to get out of it.
I knew that feeling. I’d built my whole life around it.
She hung up the phone and shifted on the couch, adjusting the ice pack. “Hartley’s going to tell Bobbi where I am. She wanted to come get me, but I told her the road up here isn’t exactly GPS-friendly.”
“It’s not. The gravel road off the main route isn’t marked. Most people don’t know it exists.”
“You like it that way.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah,” I said. “I like it that way.”
She looked around the cabin—the bookshelves, the woodstove, the single mug, the general absence of anything that suggested a life shared with another person. I watched her take inventory. I watched her draw conclusions. I waited for the question that always came next.
Why are you up here alone?
She didn’t ask it.
Instead, she said, “Is there any chance you have coffee? The fall knocked the granola bar out of me, and caffeine might keep me from feeling sorry for myself.”
I made coffee. Two mugs this time, which meant pulling the second one from the back of the cabinet where it had sat unused since Dash’s last visit.
I brought them to the living room and handed her one, then sat in the chair across from the couch instead of beside her, because the couch felt too close and the kitchen felt too far.
“You said you run an outfitting company,” she said, wrapping both hands around the mug. “Or you did. Which is it?”
“I co-own it. Wildwood Ridge Outfitters. My partners, Evan and Dash, run the day-to-day.”
“And you do what? Live up here and rescue women who fall off ridges?”
“Apparently.”
She studied me over the rim of her coffee. I was used to people looking at me and seeing the beard, the hair, the cabin, and filling in the blanks with whatever story made sense to them. Hermit. Recluse. Guy who couldn’t handle the real world.
Brooklyn looked at me like she was waiting for the real version.
“Something happened,” she said. “On a trail. Someone got hurt.”
I set my mug down. “How did you know that?”
“You wrapped my ankle like you’d done it a hundred times, and then you looked at it like you were remembering the one time it wasn’t enough.” She held my gaze. “I’m not asking you to tell me. I’m just saying I noticed.”
Nobody had said that to me. Not Evan, who’d tried to talk me back with logistics and business plans. Not Dash, who’d tried with silence and beer. Nobody had simply looked at me and said, “I see what you’re carrying, and I’m not going to make you put it down.”
My throat tightened. I picked up my mug and drank coffee I couldn’t taste, and I looked at this woman on my couch—this stranger with her borrowed boots, her dying phone, and her blown ankle—and I felt the thing I’d been numb to for seven months.
I felt it everywhere.
Not the shift from the ridge. Something else. Something that settled in lower. Deeper. In the foundation of me, like a beam being placed where a support had been missing.
It was the feeling of looking at someone and knowing, with a certainty that bypassed logic and went straight to bone, that this person mattered.
That they were going to matter for a long time.
That whatever came next—wherever she went when her ankle healed and the festival ended and her friends packed up and drove home—I was going to be different because she’d sat on my couch and seen me.
I had known Evan for fifteen years. I had known Dash for twelve. The moment I knew they were my people had felt exactly like this—sudden, undeniable, permanent.
Brooklyn was something else entirely. But the certainty was the same.
“You should stay off that ankle for at least a day,” I said, because it was the only thing I could say that didn’t involve telling a woman I’d met an hour ago that she’d just rearranged my entire internal landscape. “The couch is yours as long as you need it.”
“I can’t take your couch. Hartley will figure out how to get up here—”
“The road’s rough even in a truck. Your friend isn’t getting up here in whatever rental she’s driving.
” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
“I’ll drive you down tomorrow if the swelling’s gone down.
For tonight, you’re safer here. There’s food.
There’s heat. There’s a landline if you need to call anyone. ”
She looked at me for a long moment. I could see her weighing it—the risk of staying in a stranger’s cabin against the reality of a blown ankle and a mountain road she couldn’t navigate.
I watched the math happen behind her eyes and I waited, because I wasn’t going to convince her. She was going to decide. And whatever she decided, I’d respect it.
“Okay,” she said. “One night.”
I nodded and stood. “I’ll make dinner.”
“You cook?”
“I eat. Cooking is just the thing that happens before.”
The ghost of a smile crossed her face—the second one. I was counting.
I went to the kitchen and started pulling things from the fridge, and for the first time in seven months, I wanted to make something that tasted like more than survival.