2. Elias
ELIAS
The guys at the station are fine. Good firefighters, decent people. They stopped trying to invite me out for beers about three months in, which is faster than most crews I’ve worked with. I appreciate that more than they’ll ever know.
The road up to my cabin forks about four miles outside of town.
Left goes to my place. Right winds farther up the ridge toward the trailhead and the handful of houses scattered along the tree line.
I take the left fork most nights. Same road, same routine, same silence waiting for me at the other end of it.
Tonight the silence doesn’t sound like relief. It sounds like four walls and a long evening with nothing but my own head for company. Some nights that’s fine, but tonight it’s not.
I know why. I almost said something to her this morning. Morgan. The woman at the bakery who hands me my coffee and my muffin every day and doesn’t push, doesn’t pry, just lets me be the silent guy who nods and leaves.
Six months of the same routine, and today I opened my mouth and almost let something out that I can’t take back.
I don’t even know what it was going to be.
Something stupid. Something that would’ve bridged the careful distance I’ve built between us and let her see what’s actually going on behind the two-word answers.
I didn’t say it. I nodded and left, and I’ve been replaying it all day like an idiot.
I take the left fork, same as always, and by 6:20, I’m parked in front of the cabin with the engine off and the quiet pressing in.
This is why I live up here. Not the distance from town, not the solitude for its own sake.
The mountain. I’ve always been better in the woods than anywhere else, better on a trail than in a room full of people trying to make conversation about things that don’t matter.
The trees don’t need anything from me. They don’t ask questions or wait for answers or look at me with that careful expression people get when they can tell something’s wrong but they’re too polite to say it.
I last about ten minutes inside before the walls start closing in. The trail that runs behind my property connects to the ridge path, and some nights when the cabin feels too small, I walk it until my legs are tired enough to make the silence bearable. Tonight is one of those nights.
I grab the flashlight from the hook by the back door and start up the trail.
I grew up on trails like this one. Copper Peak, Colorado—a town small enough that everybody knew my dad by his first name and my granddad by his reputation. Both firefighters. Both built for the mountains in a way that seemed genetic, like the altitude was coded into our blood.
I left at nineteen for a hotshot crew out of Montana because I wanted to fight the kind of fires that mattered. Fires that ate whole mountainsides and tested everything you had.
Turns out, the fires weren’t the test. The trust was.
Twenty guys on a line, depending on each other’s judgment and each other’s calls—and when your call is wrong and someone pays for it, that doesn’t go away.
You move, you start over, you build a different life in a different town, and it’s still right there every time you close your eyes.
Three towns in four years. Bend, then northern California, then here. Each one a little more remote, a little quieter, a little farther from anyone who might make the mistake of counting on me.
The trail forks, and I go left without thinking about it. It drops toward the far side of the ridge and winds through a stretch of old-growth pine that blocks out most of the remaining light.
I’ve walked this trail enough times to know every root and rock by feel, which is why I notice the ones that have been recently disturbed. Scuffed rocks. A broken branch at shin height. The impression of a shoe in a patch of soft dirt that’s too narrow and too shallow to be a hiking boot.
Sneakers. Someone is up here in sneakers.
I stop. The tracks go up but there’s nothing coming back down, and the temperature is still dropping with maybe thirty minutes of usable light left.
Anyone up here in sneakers didn’t plan to be on this trail, and anyone who doesn’t know this trail is getting farther from the road with every step, not closer.
Something at the base of my spine pulls tight. The same instinct that used to wake me up on the fire line before the wind shifted. The one I’ve spent three years trying to ignore because listening to it means caring about what happens next, and caring is the thing that breaks you.
I pick up the pace.
The trail climbs and then drops sharply around a rock outcropping. That’s when I see her.
She’s about thirty yards ahead, limping.
Favoring her right side, arms wrapped around herself against the cold, moving with the kind of careful determination that tells me she’s been hurt for a while and she’s talking herself through every step.
She’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans. No jacket.
No pack. Nothing that says she planned to be up here.
My whole body reacts at once. A fist closing around my lungs and squeezing until I can’t breathe, because the woman limping down a darkening trail in sneakers and a T-shirt is Morgan.
I close the distance fast. My boots are loud on the loose rock, and I can see the moment she hears me because her whole body goes rigid and she starts to turn. She’s about to run, bad ankle and all.
“Morgan.”
She stops. Turns the rest of the way. Her face is pale and her eyes are wide and she’s shivering in a way that tells me she’s been cold for longer than she wants to admit.
Her gaze moves over me, and I watch the fear drain out of her and get replaced by something I’m not prepared for.
Relief so deep it almost looks like it pains her.
“You’re hurt,” I say.
“I’m fine,” she says, and the way she says it tells me she’s been saying it her whole life whether it’s true or not.
“No. You’re not.”
I’m already crouching in front of her, my hands on her ankle before I’ve made the conscious decision to touch her.
The joint is swollen, hot through the fabric of her shoe.
She flinches when I press gently along the outside bone but doesn’t pull away.
Not broken. Sprained, and a bad one based on the swelling.
“Can you put weight on it?”
“I have been. For about a mile.”
I look up at her. She’s looking down at me with her jaw tight and her chin lifted slightly, the way people do when they’re trying to hold themselves together.
Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are glassy and she’s blinking too fast, and I watch her throat work as she swallows hard.
This is a woman who takes care of everyone and doesn’t know what it feels like when someone takes care of her, and right now she looks like she might break apart if I say the wrong thing.
So I don’t say anything. I stand up, shrug off my flannel, and wrap it around her shoulders. Her hands come up to pull it closed, and she takes a breath that shudders on the way in.
“My cabin is closer than town,” I say. “Can you walk if you lean on me?”
She nods.
I put my arm around her waist. She slides hers across my shoulders, and the contact sends something through me that I have no business feeling right now.
Her body is cold against mine, shaking, weighing almost nothing when she leans into me.
If I’d stayed inside tonight—if I’d sat on the couch and stared at the walls the way I do most nights—she’d still be up here. Alone. In the dark. Getting colder.
The walk to the cabin takes twenty minutes. It should take ten, but I keep the pace slow and steady and don’t rush her.
She doesn’t talk much. A few times she stumbles, and I tighten my arm around her—and she makes a small sound that guts me. More surprise than pain. Like being caught before she falls is something her body doesn’t know how to process yet.
The cabin comes into view through the trees, and I feel her exhale against my shoulder.
I get her inside and onto the couch, and I don’t think about how she looks in my space—in my flannel, with her hair falling loose around her face and her eyes following me as I move around the kitchen getting the kettle on.
I don’t think about it because if I start, I won’t stop.
I kneel in front of her and unlace her shoe, easing it off her swollen ankle as carefully as I can.
She winces but holds still. I get a bag of ice from the freezer and wrap it in a dish towel and press it gently against the joint, and when I look up, her eyes are full and her lip is trembling and she still hasn’t cried.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
I nod. Because that’s what I do. That’s all I ever let myself do around this woman.
But my hands are still on her ankle and her skin is warming under my fingers.
I eat that blueberry muffin at the station every morning while I replay the sound of her voice.
Same as always? I almost said something to her today at the counter, and I still don’t know what it was going to be.
All I know is that if anything had happened to her on that trail tonight, I would have burned this whole mountain to the ground.
The kettle whistles. I stand up and go to the kitchen and pour two cups of tea and bring them back, and when I hand her the mug, our fingers touch. Neither one of us pulls away.