26. Noa
Noa
The radio crackled twice before it caught a signal.
I was on the couch with my ankle propped up the way Calder had insisted, the way I’d stopped arguing about because honestly it still ached if I was on my feet for too long even if I didn’t want to admit it.
Shepherd was at the table with the notebook open and a laptop, working through the next item on his list, which was apparently the spreadsheet of my outstanding deliverables to the regional office.
Bo was at the window with his coffee. Calder was at the radio, fiddling with the dial the way he did when he wasn’t sure he was going to get reception but wanted to try anyway.
The dial caught. There was a long pause of clean static, the kind of static that meant the signal had actually come through and was just waiting for somebody to talk.
“Hollow Haven ranger station, this is the homestead up on Burn Ridge. Wes, you on shift?”
A pause.
Then a voice came through, scratchy but unmistakable.
“Calder? Holy shit, is that you?”
“Yeah.”
“Is Noa with you?”
“She is.”
“Is she alive?”
“She is.”
“Put her on the goddamn radio.”
Calder’s mouth pulled. He looked over at me. I held out my hand. He brought the handset across the cabin and crouched down beside the couch and pressed it into my palm.
“Wes,” I said.
“NOA.” His voice went thick and loud at the same time, the way his voice always went when he was trying not to be emotional and was failing. “Holy shit. We thought you might be dead.”
“I know. I nearly was.”
“Hell of a way to disappear for a month, Bellamy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, you absolute disaster. Are you OK? Tell me you’re OK.”
I caught my breath. I had been planning this conversation in my head for two days. I had written notes in Shepherd’s notebook about what I wanted to say to him. I had practiced.
None of it came out the way I’d practiced.
“I’m OK,” I said. “Better than OK, actually.”
A long pause.
“Better than OK?” I could hear the hesitation in his voice like he was trying to figure out how to get to me immediately because I was clearly not as OK as I was saying.
“Yeah.”
“Better than OK like I survived a blizzard and feel cocky about it better than OK, or better than OK like something happened up there better than OK?”
“Second one.”
The pause was longer this time.
“Noa,” he snapped when I didn’t immediately elaborate.
“Yeah, Wes?” This was actually pretty fun.
He sighed dramatically. “Are you safe?”
The bond pulsed in my chest. All three of them. Steady, present, waiting for me to handle this however I wanted to handle it.
“I’m the safest I’ve ever been in my life,” I said. “I want you to hear that. I’m saying it on purpose.”
Another pause. A longer one. I could practically hear him sitting down in his chair at the ranger station, processing.
“OK,” he said finally. “OK, kid. Tell me what I need to know.”
I let out a long breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
“The storm caught me on the ridge,” I said. “I lost my gear in the creek. I came up here because you’d told me about the homestead. I broke my ankle on the way and got hypothermic and Calder pulled me off his porch unconscious. They kept me alive. I’ve been here ever since.”
“OK.”
“The second storm hit while my ankle was healing. Then a third. Then the thaw.”
“OK.”
“And in the middle of all of that, things… developed.”
“Developed?”
“Wes…”
“Are you using the word developed to me, Noa Bellamy?”
“I am.”
“With a straight face?”
“I’m not making any promises about my face. You’re on the radio.”
Calder snorted. He was still crouched beside the couch, his hand on my good ankle, listening.
Shepherd had stopped pretending to work on his spreadsheet.
Bo had come away from the window and was standing in the middle of the cabin watching me, arms crossed, that small private expression of his that I’d come to read as amused.
“Developed,” Wes said again. He sounded like he was trying out the word.
“There’s three of them, Wes.”
“I am aware that there’s three of them. I was the one who told you about the homestead.”
“I’ve bonded all three of them.”
The radio went silent for a long count.
When he came back his voice was very quiet. Not in a bad way. The way he got when he was processing something serious.
“Noa?”
“Yeah.”
“On purpose?”
“Yes.”
“Lucid?”
“Yes.”
“They didn’t take advantage of you when your suppressants ran out and your heat hit?”
“No.”
“You’re saying that to me because it’s true? Not because you’re scared of them?”
“It’s true. And they’re right here listening. They’d back me up but you wouldn’t believe them. You wouldn’t even believe me alone in a room. So I want you to come up here and look at me.”
A pause.
“As soon as the road clears.”
“Yes.”
“It’ll probably be the end of the week.”
“Yes.”
“And then you tell me the whole story.”
“And then I promise to tell you the whole story.”
“Noa?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you happy?”
I looked at the three of them.
Calder’s steady hand on my ankle. The way he was watching me with that look that had been on him since the night he’d carried me in, the one I’d misread for weeks because I’d thought it was concern when it had actually been the opposite of concern.
Shepherd at the table with his notebook, the reading glasses he wouldn’t wear around me anymore unless he was actually reading, folded next to his coffee mug.
Bo with his arms crossed and his small amused expression, ready to back me up however I wanted to be backed up.
“Wes,” I said, “I am so happy I’m almost annoyed about it.”
He laughed. Actually laughed. A surprised gusty thing.
“OK,” he said. “OK. That’s good enough for me until I see you in person.”
“Good.”
“Your truck is in the lot at the trailhead. I figured you’d want me to know where it was. Snow’s halfway up the windows. We’ll dig it out when we come up.”
“Thank you.”
“And your apartment is fine. Willa’s been watering your plants. She did it without being asked. I told her you were probably dead and she said I should keep my mouth shut and stop borrowing trouble.”
I laughed. It came out a little wet.
“God bless Willa.”
“God bless Willa. She’s been a champion. She and a couple of the others have been keeping an eye on things. Mail’s in the office. Bills are paid. Your fieldwork email is six hundred messages deep but I’ve been screening it for anything urgent.”
“Wes.”
“What?”
“Thank you. For all of it.”
“Yeah,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Of course.”
A pause.
“Listen,” he said. “Before I let you go. Calder, you still listening?”
“I’m here,” Calder said, leaning toward the handset.
“If she changes her mind about any of this. Any of it. You make sure she has a way down off the ridge. I don’t mean tomorrow. I mean ever.”
“Already done,” Calder said. “The truck is keyed for her. She picks the day, we drive her. No questions.”
“Good.”
“Wes?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s good to hear your voice.”
“You too, trouble maker. Get the radio back on the cradle before the wind kills the signal. I’ll see you when the road’s clear.”
“See you then.”
The signal cut.
The cabin went very quiet.
I sat there with the handset still in my hand.
Calder reached over carefully and took it from me, walked it back to the radio, set it in the cradle.
Nobody spoke. Shepherd had closed the notebook.
Bo had come closer without my noticing, was leaning against the back of the couch now, his hand on my shoulder.
The bond was holding me up the way you hold up someone who’s just walked a long way.
“OK,” I said. My voice was steadier than I’d expected. “OK. I did that.”
“You did,” Calder said.
“You did beautifully,” Shepherd said.
“Yeah,” Bo said.
I sat there and let the bond hum and the fire crackle. The gutters dripped outside, and I let myself feel the size of what had just happened.
I had told the outside world. Well, the first member of it, anyway. The most important one. The one whose opinion of my life I had cared most about, even when I’d pretended I didn’t care about anyone’s opinion of my life.
Wes had taken me under his wing. He’d asked the right questions in the right order, and had decided to believe me.
And when he told Willa, she’d tell the rest of the people I’d been quietly making a half-life among. And by the time we drove down off the ridge, the town would already know. Half of them through gossip. Half of them through Wes telling them directly, because that was who he was.
I’d been so afraid of this part.
I hadn’t realized I’d been afraid of it until I’d just done it.
“Hey,” Bo said quietly.
“Yeah.”
“You did the hard one.”
“I know.”
“The rest is easier than that.”
“I know.”
“You OK?”
“Yeah.”
“For real?”
“For real.”
He squeezed my shoulder, then went back to the window with his coffee. Calder came over and sat down on the couch beside me, pulling my legs into his lap so my ankle was elevated against his thigh. Shepherd watched us from the table.
“What now?” I said.
“Now,” Calder said, “we keep going. Through the list. There’s still a lot of work to do.”
“God, Shepherd will be insufferable about that.”
“I will be smugly correct about it,” Shepherd said. “Which is different.”
“Sure.”
I tipped my head back against the couch and closed my eyes. The bond hummed. And I let myself soak up the comfort of the warm cabin. Outside, the world was unfreezing fast enough that I could practically hear the road clearing somewhere down below us.
I thought about my apartment in town. The small studio with the bookshelves I’d built myself. The desk by the window where I’d done four years of solo paperwork. The bed I’d slept in alone. The kitchen where I’d made pasta for one for so many evenings I’d stopped counting them.
The careful, quiet, controlled life I’d been so proud of.
I thought about it the way you think about a place you’ve been about to move out of. With a small flicker of affection. With more relief than I’d expected.
I had loved that life. I built it on purpose, and, for a while, it had kept me safe.
But it had also been a life I’d lived in case nobody ever wanted me. It had been a life designed around the assumption that I’d be alone forever and might as well make alone work as well as I could.
I didn’t need it anymore.
I walked through a snowstorm, crashed onto a stranger’s porch and ended up bonded to three men who would burn the world for me. I didn’t need the careful little half-life in town anymore.
What I needed was here. What I wanted was here. And, more importantly, what I was going to fight for was here.