Chapter 20
The problem is solvable. That was Garrick’s first thought, and his second, and his third.
It was how his mind worked—a problem arrived, and he took it apart until he found a solution.
He’d spread the Hollow Ridge file across the long table in the study by Monday morning, and by Monday afternoon he had a list.
“There are studies for this,” he told Maris.
She stood on the other side of the table with her arms crossed, still dressed for the garden, dirt drying pale on her knees.
She’d knelt in the rose bed all day and then come up to the house because he’d asked her to.
“Environmental impact studies. You bring in a botanist, document the colony, define a buffer. If the population’s viable you fence it and route the grading around it.
If the seep’s the only issue, you protect the recharge zone.
It’s a hydrology question. Those are answerable. ”
“And if it can’t be routed around?”
“Then you transplant.” He turned the survey so she could see it and tapped the north slope. “There are firms that do nothing but move sensitive species. You lift the whole stand, soil column intact, and set it down on protected ground. I’ve done it before, on a wetland job outside Asheville.”
He’d expected her to be relieved. He’d built the list for her.
She’d looked so stricken over that photograph, and he’d wanted to hand her a solution the way he’d hand a foreman a fix.
Here. This works. Stop worrying. He was good at this.
It was the one form of help he trusted—find the fault, price the fix, get it done.
She didn’t look relieved. She looked at him the way she’d looked at the Bobcat in her driveway.
“Transplant it,” she repeated.
“If it comes to that.”
“Garrick.” She uncrossed her arms and put both hands on the table, leaning towards him, her voice very level.
“There are only a dozen stands of that lily in the whole state. You know why? Because it won’t grow anywhere else.
It needs cold water coming up through the rock all summer, and sun on it, and air moving past it, and ground that stays wet and drains at the same time.
You can’t build that. The place is the plant.
Take it out of that seep and you don’t have a rescued lily, you have a dead one and a very expensive hole. ”
He absorbed that, and adjusted his plans. “Then you don’t transplant. You protect it in place. Buffer, fence, redesign the—”
“It’s not about the fence.” She pushed off the table and turned away, not looking at him at all and that bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
“You’re doing it again. You’re handing me solutions.
You’ve got a dozen of them and they’re all reasonable and every single one of them starts from we’re going to build the resort.
You haven’t once—” She stopped, and sighed, and finally turned back to him.
“You haven’t once asked whether the resort should be there at all. ”
She was right. His mind had gone straight to how do we build it around this, and it had never once stopped on the question underneath. He was quiet for a long moment.
“I’ve got two hundred thousand dollars of my firm’s money in that bid,” he said.
It wasn’t a defense. He just wanted her to have the numbers he had.
“Design work, geotech, the survey, three months of a team’s time.
If we don’t submit, that’s gone. If we submit and win, it’s the biggest contract this company’s booked in two years.
I don’t say that to argue. I say it so you understand what I’m actually weighing. ”
“I understand that.” Her expression softened a fraction.
She had never once pretended money didn’t matter.
“I’m not asking you to set fire to two hundred thousand dollars because a plant is pretty.
I’m asking you to come look at it with me and Aidan before you decide anything else.
” She held his gaze. “You keep telling me you listen. So come listen to the ground.”
He looked at the file. Three months of work. A team’s time. The board on a call from Atlanta, waiting for a number.
“Tomorrow morning,” he agreed. “Before the light gets high.”
Her shoulders came down. She hadn’t been sure he’d say yes. That stung more than he expected—after the rug and the fire and the wing folded over her all night, she’d still been braced for him to choose the file.
He’d have to fix that too. Later, and not with a list.
Hollow Ridge sat twenty minutes out of town, past the last of the falls, where the county road turned to gravel and then to a rutted logging track.
Doris complained about every yard of it and his wings hit the roof with every bump, but he very carefully refrained from pointing out that his truck had four-wheel drive and better suspension.
Aidan met them at the gate in his ranger’s green, leaning against the government pickup with a thermos.
He had the unbearable cheerfulness of a male who’d been awake for hours and enjoyed every one of them.
“You came.” He handed both of them a cup of surprisingly good coffee from the thermos. “I owe Ben ten bucks. He bet you’d send an underling.”
“I don’t have underlings. I have employees.”
“Ben’s going to be devastated.”
They went up on foot. The track gave way to real forest—oak and hickory just beginning to turn colors, the ground soft with fallen leaves.
He walked it with a builder’s eyes despite himself, reading the slope and the way the land shed its water and the places a road would have to cut and fill.
Maris walked it differently. She stopped to touch things, naming them under her breath.
She crouched next to a fern he wouldn’t have looked at twice and said, in a reverent voice, that’s a bulblet fern, that only grows where the water’s clean.
The seep was near the top, on the cold north face of the ridge, where the trees thinned and the ground turned to a slick dark shine that wasn’t quite a stream and wasn’t quite solid ground.
They found the lilies. More of them than Aidan had counted, though there wasn’t a flower left on the hill.
Only the stems, rising thin and straight out of the moss with their leaves gone yellow, and a dry pod at the top of each one where the red had been in July.
Maris froze for a moment, then went down on her knees in the wet moss, and the sound she made was almost the one she made in the dark.
“Don’t touch,” she breathed. “God. Just look at them.”
He looked. And because he’d promised to listen, he made himself stop reading the slope like a builder. He let her tell him why this one patch of hillside was the only place in ten thousand acres the lilies could live. She read it from the soil and the moss and the color of the water.
Then he put his hand on the outcrop above the seep, and he read it too.
It came to him the way stone always came to him, as a kind of knowledge that ran up his arm and settled in his chest, older than language.
Rock had a voice for his kind and this one told him where the water came from.
He could feel the rain falling on the broad shoulder of the ridge above, threading down through fractures in the bedrock, and running cold and slow along a tilted seam for a hundred yards underground.
The whole hill fed this one wet square of moss.
Break the seam anywhere and the water would find a new way out somewhere lower, and this ground would be dry inside a season.
She read the soil. He read the rock. For one long moment, crouched in the cold with his hand on the stone and hers in the moss, they were doing the same job.
“You can’t build up-slope of this,” he said, his own voice sounding strange to him.
“Anything you do to the top of the ridge changes where the water comes out. It won’t matter how far back you set your buffer.
Cut the recharge and the seep’s dead inside a year.
” He took his hand off the rock. “The place is the plant. You were right.”
She didn’t gloat. She just looked up at him from where she knelt, the knees of her jeans soaked through.
Aidan cleared his throat.
“Long as we’re up here,” the werewolf said, and the cheerfulness had turned into something drier, “that’s not all of it.
” He pointed back the way they’d come. “The only access is that grade we drove up. You’d have to widen it and cut it deeper, and half of it runs along a slope I wouldn’t trust in a hard rain. It slid twice that I know of.”
“When?”
“Once when I was a pup. Once the spring before last, lower down. That one took out a stretch of the old logging road and nobody thought it was worth putting back.”
Garrick nodded. Serious, then, but not insurmountable. Just expensive.
He looked down the ridge, then out across the view that had drawn Palisade to the site in the first place. He’d come up here expecting to find a problem he could build around. He hadn’t. He’d found a place they shouldn’t build on, which should have simplified things. It didn’t.
Stonehaven Construction could walk away.
They could eat the loss, withdraw the bid, and tell Palisade to find another contractor.
And Palisade would. Someone else would build it, and the lilies would be just as dead.
He was sure there must be a solution, but for once, he couldn’t find the place to begin.
“I have to think,” he said.
Maris looked up at him from the moss, and she was smiling. “Think, or go to stone and think?”
She’d asked it the way she’d have asked whether he wanted coffee, but he saw the relief on her face.
He went to stone in the conservatory that afternoon.
It wasn’t a decision so much as a need. When a problem was too big to take apart awake, he went to stone and let the still cold part of him turn it over.
His father had done it in the entrance hall, in a chair that had held four generations of Stonehavens.
He preferred the conservatory, with the warm southern light and the potted lemon trees, and a granite plinth he’d set there on footings he poured himself.
Maris came with him.
She didn’t ask him. She simply followed him in, curled into the wide wicker chair he’d brought down, and pulled a book out of her bag.
She settled in like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to keep a male company while he turned to rock.
He stopped next to the plinth and looked at her.
Looked at the sunlight in her hair, the dirt still on her knees, and the small line between her brows.
His chest felt so full and quiet that he had to look away.
Toby had once asked him who woke him up. He hadn’t answered. Now he had an answer.
“You don’t have to stay,” he said.
“I know.” She didn’t look up. “I have to get Toby at three. Other than that, I’ll be right here.”
So he climbed onto the plinth and folded his wings around himself the way he’d done thousands of times, and let the change come.
The slow cold spread up from the base of his spine, the world going soft and far away, sound thickening to a low tidal hush, and his heartbeat stretched out longer and longer between the beats until it was barely a heartbeat at all.
The last thing he was aware of, before the male went down into the stone, was the small whisper of a page turning, and the sound of her breathing.
Then the stone had him, and the problem opened out in the dark—easements and watersheds, a ruined bid and a hillside of red lilies. He sat with it, certain that given enough time the answer would show itself.
He didn’t know exactly how many hours passed. A small distant part of him was aware of the angle of the light changing, of Maris going out and coming back, of a second, lighter set of footsteps arriving with her. But he was rock, and rock doesn’t count the hours.
He was still deep under, the answer just beginning to surface, when a sound reached him from very far away.
The slow, dry creak of a door opening. Not the conservatory door.
Down the west corridor, where a certain door had been shut since the one time he’d opened it, and had no business opening now.