6. Elias
ELIAS
She’s waiting for me outside Sugar Moon when I pull up at two.
She changed out of her work clothes. Jeans, a light jacket, and hiking boots. I notice the boots and breathe a sigh of relief. She learned from the last time.
Her hair is down, which I’ve never seen before because she always has it pulled back at the bakery. It falls past her shoulders in loose waves, and I sit in the truck for a second longer than I should, watching her through the windshield and telling myself to breathe.
She spots the truck and smiles, and the whole damn street gets brighter.
I lean across and open the passenger door. She climbs in, and the cab fills with that scent I’ve had in my head for days. Vanilla and sugar. She buckles in and looks over at me, and I realize I haven’t said anything yet.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
She’s smiling, and it’s different from her bakery smile. That one is warm but practiced—the one she gives everyone. This one is smaller, a little uncertain, like she’s not sure what the rules are when we’re not separated by a counter and a cash register.
That makes two of us.
I drive out of town and up the mountain road.
The turnoff to the lookout is about two miles past my cabin—a dirt track that dead-ends at a clearing where the trees open up and the whole valley spreads out below.
I found it my first week in Wildwood—one of those days when the cabin was too small and the station was too crowded and I needed to stand somewhere high enough to see the edges of everything.
I’ve never brought anyone up here.
We park, and I grab a couple of water bottles from behind the seat.
The trail to the lookout is short, maybe a quarter mile through old-growth pine.
I let her set the pace. Her ankle is better, but I can still see the ghost of the limp if I watch closely—the way she places her left foot a fraction more carefully than her right.
She doesn’t mention it, and I don’t ask.
The last four days have taught me that Morgan talks about her pain when she’s ready and not a second before.
The trees thin out and then we’re there.
The lookout is just a flat rock shelf at the edge of the ridge—nothing official, no guardrail, no marker.
Just granite and sky and the valley below, and on a clear day you can see all the way to the next range.
Today is clear. The light is that late-afternoon gold that makes everything look like it exists outside of time.
The kind of light that makes you forget about stations and shifts and all the things that keep you moving so you don’t have to stand still.
She stops at the edge and takes a breath, and I watch her shoulders drop. “This is yours,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“This place. It’s where you come when you need to not be anywhere else.” She looks back at me. “I can tell because it feels like you.”
I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what it means to feel like me, or how she figured that out, or why the fact that she said it makes something behind my ribs ache in a way that almost feels good.
We sit on the rock. Not too close, not too far. The distance between us is about the length of my forearm, and I’m aware of every inch of it.
“Tell me about Copper Peak,” she says.
She doesn’t push. She just opens the door and waits to see if I’ll walk through it, the same way she’s been doing since the first morning I showed up at her counter and said nothing—and she let me. I’ve been walking past that door for months. Today I stop.
“My dad was a firefighter,” I say. “His dad before him. Small-town department, volunteer mostly. The kind of place where everyone knows your family and your family goes back far enough that the town feels like it belongs to you.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It was.” I pick up a piece of loose granite and turn it over in my hand. “I left when I was nineteen. Joined a hotshot crew out of Montana.”
“That’s the wildfire teams?”
“Yeah. Twenty guys on a line, cutting fuel breaks, hiking into terrain nobody else wants to touch. You train together, eat together, sleep in the dirt together. After a while, they’re not your crew. They’re your family.”
I can feel her watching me. Patient. Still.
“There was a fire in eastern Oregon. August, four years ago. The wind was doing something unpredictable—shifting every few hours—and we were cutting a line along a ridge that was supposed to hold. I was the one who called the position. I read the terrain, I checked the weather, I told the guys where to dig.” I stop.
The granite in my hand is warm from the sun and I press my thumb into the flat side of it until it hurts.
“The wind shifted. Not gradually. All at once, and the fire came over the ridge from a direction I didn’t account for. ”
The silence between us changes. It gets heavier, more careful.
“One of my guys got caught. Chaz Monroe. Twenty-two years old. He was maybe forty yards from the safety zone when it rolled over him.” I set the rock down.
“He lived. Burns on thirty percent of his body, six months in a burn unit, and he lived. But he’s never going back on a line, and every time I think about him, I think about how I’m the one who told him to stand there. ”
Morgan doesn’t say anything.
She doesn’t say that wasn’t your fault or you couldn’t have known or any of the things people say when they want to make someone feel better without actually sitting in the dark with them.
She just stays. Right there on the rock next to me, her hands in her lap, her eyes on the valley, breathing the same air.
The silence stretches out, and I wait for it to feel unbearable the way it always does when I think about Chaz. The way it felt in Bend when I couldn’t sleep and in California when I started driving north one morning and didn’t stop.
But sitting here next to Morgan, the silence doesn’t feel like something I need to escape. It feels like a place I’m allowed to set this down for a minute without anyone trying to pick it up and hand it back to me with a bow on it.
“Is that why you came to Wildwood?” she asks after a while.
“Yeah.”
“Is that why you don’t let anyone close?”
The question is so direct and so quiet that it cuts right through me. Anyone else, and I’d shut it down. Change the subject, stand up, walk back to the truck. That’s the protocol. That’s what distance looks like when you’ve been practicing it for four years.
But she asked me like she already knew the answer and was just giving me the chance to say it out loud. And something about this woman, this rock, this light makes me tired of keeping it behind my teeth.
“Yeah,” I say. “That too.”
She nods. Her hand is resting on the rock between us.
Her fingers are close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her skin, and I think about all the mornings I’ve watched those hands pour my coffee and bag my muffin and brush against mine for a half-second that I held onto for the rest of the day.
I put my hand over hers. Her fingers are smaller than mine, warm from the sun, and when I close my hand around them, she doesn’t pull away.
She doesn’t make a big deal of it. She just turns her palm up so our fingers lace together and lets out a breath that sounds like she’s been holding it for a long time.
We sit there. The sun drops lower and the valley fills with shadow and neither of us moves. I can feel her pulse through her fingertips, steady and calm, and I match my breathing to it without realizing I’m doing it.
“We should head down,” I say eventually, because the light is going and the temperature is starting to turn. But I don’t let go of her hand, and she doesn’t let go of mine, and we walk back to the truck like that, connected, quiet, her steps careful on the loose ground and my pace matched to hers.
I open her door. She climbs in. I go around to my side and sit there with the engine off, looking at the trail we just walked down.
I should take her back to town. To her car, to her home, to the life that doesn’t include me sitting on a rock telling her about the worst thing I’ve ever done.
That would be the smart thing. The safe thing.
The thing that keeps the distance intact and the walls standing and the system running the way it’s supposed to.
“Do you want to come back to the cabin?” I ask. “I can make coffee. Or something.”
The or something hangs in the air, and I feel like an idiot for saying it, but she smiles that smile that’s just for me.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’d like that.”
I start the engine.