Chapter 7 - Hannah
I wanted him to tell me there's a trick to it. A timeline. A method. Six weeks and you'll stop jumping at loud noises. Three months and you'll stop seeing the gun every time you close your eyes. A year and you'll be fine.
But he's not telling me that. He's telling me this is just... it. This is what I get now. Fear I have to carry around like luggage I can't put down.
"That's bleak," I say, trying to keep my voice light and failing completely.
Griffin shrugs, still crouched by the fire, his hands wrapped around his coffee mug. "It's honest."
"I hate that you're right."
"Yeah. I figured."
We sit in silence for a moment, just the crackle of the fire and the sound of our breathing. The cabin is warming up now, heat radiating out from the wood stove in waves. I pull the quilts tighter around myself anyway, not because I'm cold but because I need something to hold onto.
"I don't know how to deal with this," I say finally, and my voice sounds small even to my own ears. "I don't know how to be the person I was before. I don't know if I even can be that person anymore."
Griffin is quiet for a long moment, staring into the fire. Then he sets his mug down and turns to look at me. His ice-blue eyes are serious, steady in a way that makes me feel like he's actually seeing me instead of just looking at me.
"You need to get out of it," he says.
I blink. "What?"
"You need to get out of your head. Stop replaying it.
Stop waiting for it to happen again." He leans forward, elbows on his knees.
"You need to recognize that the person you were before the gun…
She's still there. She didn't disappear.
She's just buried under all the fear, the what-ifs and the constant vigilance. "
"I don't know how to do that."
"I know how."
Something in the way he says it makes my chest tighten. Not with fear, but with something else. Hope, maybe. The possibility that he's right, that there's a way through this that doesn't involve just white-knuckling my way through every day for the rest of my life.
"How?" I ask.
He stands, moving to the window to look out at the morning. The sun is fully up now, painting the trees in shades of gold and green. "You need to trust me."
"That's it? That's your grand plan? Trust you?"
He turns back to me, "If you handled that axe yesterday, you can deal with everything."
I think about yesterday: the weight of the axe in my hands, the way he stood behind me and guided my swing, the satisfaction of splitting that first log clean through. I think about how for those few minutes, I wasn't thinking about the robbery, the gun or anything except the wood and the blade.
"That was different," I say.
"How?"
"I don't know. It just was."
"It wasn't." He crosses his arms, leaning against the counter. "You were present. You were focused on something that required your full attention. You weren't in your head cataloging threats or calculating costs. You were just... there."
He's right. I hate that he's right, but he is.
"So, what do I do?" I ask.
"Get dressed. Come with me."
I stare at him. "Now?"
"Yeah, now. The day's already started, and you're wasting it sitting in here feeling sorry for yourself."
I should be offended by that. Should tell him to get out, that I'll deal with this my own way. But the truth is, I am sitting here feeling sorry for myself. I have been for three weeks. And it hasn't helped.
"Where are we going?"
"You'll see."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
I look down at my pajamas: the unbuttoned top, the too-loose pants, the fact that I'm currently wrapped in quilts like some kind of blanket burrito. "I need to change."
"I'll wait outside."
He heads for the door, Bear following at his heels, and pauses with his hand on the handle. "Hannah."
"Yeah?"
"You don't have to trust me completely. You don't have to believe this is going to work. You just have to be willing to try."
The door closes behind him before I can respond.
I sit there for a moment longer, staring at the fire he rebuilt, thinking about what he said. About trust. About trying. About the person I was before the gun and whether she's really still there or if I'm just kidding myself.
But yesterday, when I was splitting wood, I felt like her. Even if it was only for a few minutes.
I stand up, let the quilts fall away, and head for my duffel bag. I pull on jeans, a thermal shirt, and a thick sweater. Socks. My boots. I run my fingers through my hair, still a mess, and give up on trying to tame it. This isn't a fashion show. This is... whatever Griffin has planned.
I'm not sure I'm ready for this. But I'm ready to try anything to be the person I used to be. The person who didn't jump at shadows. Who didn't see threats in every stranger. Who could walk into a room without immediately noticing all the exits.
I grab my jacket and open the door.
Griffin is leaning against the porch railing, Bear sitting at his feet. He looks up when I step out, and something in his expression softens just slightly.
"Ready?" he asks.
"No. But I'm here anyway."
"That's all that matters."
He starts walking, not toward his cabin but deeper into the forest, following a trail I didn't even know existed. I follow, because what else am I going to do? Stand here alone in a cold cabin replaying the worst moment of my life in an endless loop?
"Where are we going?" I ask again as we walk.
"Somewhere you can't be scared."
"That's not a real place."
"We'll see."
We walk in silence after that, winding through the trees. The morning is beautiful. It’s cold and crisp, the air smelling like pine, earth and something wild I still can't name. Birds call from the branches overhead. Somewhere in the distance, I can hear water running.
Griffin doesn't talk, just leads the way with Bear trotting ahead, occasionally circling back to check on us. The path is narrow and uneven, roots and rocks making the footing tricky, but Griffin moves with the kind of confidence that comes from having walked this route a thousand times.
I focus on my breathing. On the sound of my boots crunching against the pine needles and dirt. On the way the sunlight filters through the trees in golden shafts that make everything look softer than it is.
I'm not thinking about the gun.
I'm not replaying the robbery.
I'm just... here.
"Why did you choose this place?" I ask after a while, breaking the silence.
Griffin glances back at me. "What?"
"This town. This mountain. Why here?"
He's quiet for a moment, and I think he's not going to answer. Then he says, "Because it's far enough away from everything that I can breathe. Because the quiet up here is the kind of quiet that doesn't feel empty. And because nobody asks questions I don't want to answer."
"Except me."
"Except you."
"Sorry."
"Don't be. I wouldn't answer if I didn't want to."
We walk a little further, and I ask, "Do you have family? Anywhere?"
"No. Parents died while I was deployed. No siblings. Just me and Bear."
"I'm sorry."
"It was a long time ago."
"That doesn't make it better."
He stops walking and turns to look at me, and there's something almost amused in his expression. "Are you stealing my lines?"
"Maybe you should come up with new ones."
He smirks. "Come on. We're close."
We round a bend in the trail, and suddenly the trees open up into a clearing. And there, cascading down a rocky cliff face, is the prettiest waterfall I've ever seen.
It's not huge, maybe twenty feet tall, but it's perfect.
The water tumbles over moss-covered rocks in a constant, soothing rush, pooling at the bottom in a clear basin before continuing downstream.
Sunlight catches the spray, creating tiny rainbows in the mist. The sound of it drowns out everything else.
No birdsong, no wind, just water, stone and the kind of white noise that fills up all the empty spaces in your head.
I stare at it, unable to form words.
Griffin walks to the edge of the pool and sits on a large flat rock, Bear settling beside him. He looks back at me, waiting.
"This is..." I start, then stop. "This is beautiful."
"Yeah."
"You come here a lot?"
"When I need to clear my head."
I walk over and sit beside him. The rock is cold through my jeans, but I don't care. I'm too busy staring at the waterfall, at the way the light moves through the spray, at the absolute peace of this place.
"It's time for you to simply enjoy your life," Griffin says, and his voice is quieter now, almost gentle. "No one will scare you here."
I look at him, at this massive, scarred man who broke into my cabin this morning to make sure I hadn't frozen to death. Who taught me to split wood and build fires. Who just told me I need to get out of my own head and then brought me to the most peaceful place I've ever seen.
"Thank you," I say.
"I told you to stop thanking me."
"And I told you to stop doing things that make me want to thank you."
He looks at me for a long moment and then huffs out something that might be a laugh. "You're an idiot."
"Excuse me?"
"An idiot," he repeats, standing up and brushing off his jeans. "Now stop sitting there looking at it like it's a postcard and get in."
I blink up at him. "Get in? Get in the water?"
"That's generally what you do at a waterfall."
"I thought we were just going to sit here. Listen to it. Be peaceful."
"You can listen to it from inside."
I stare at the pool. The water is clear enough that I can see the rocky bottom, and even from here I can tell it's going to be absolutely freezing. "Griffin, it's October. That water is probably forty degrees."
"Probably closer to fifty. Don't be dramatic."
"I don't have a bathing suit."
"Neither do I."
Before I can process what that means, he's pulling his flannel off, then his thermal shirt, dropping both onto the rock beside him. And there he is again… All that muscle, scarred skin and raw strength that should probably intimidate me but somehow just makes my mouth go dry.
"You're insane," I say, but I can't look away.
"Probably." He toes off his boots, then his socks. "You coming or not?"
"I'm not… Griffin, that water is freezing."
"That's the point."
He doesn't give me time to argue further. He just turns and runs toward the water. This massive, scarred mountain man running like a kid toward a swimming hole, and dives in with a splash that sends water spraying up into the sunlight.
He surfaces a second later with a sharp exhale that's half gasp, half laugh, water streaming down his face and shoulders. His hair is plastered to his head, and he's grinning. Actually grinning, like this is the best thing he's done all week.
"Holy shit," he says, shaking water out of his eyes. "That's cold."
"I told you!"
"Get in here, Hannah."
"Absolutely not."
"You said you'd try."
"I said I'd try to get out of my head. I didn't say anything about hypothermia."
He swims closer to where I'm sitting, and I can see goosebumps rising on his arms despite the grin still on his face. "You're thinking about the water temperature. You're thinking about whether you have the right clothes. You're thinking about a thousand reasons not to do this."
"Because they're good reasons!"
"They're excuses." He treads water, looking up at me. "When's the last time you did something just because? Not because it made sense or because you planned it or because it was safe. When's the last time you just... did something?"
I open my mouth to answer and realize I don't have one. Everything I've done for years has been calculated. Planned. Safe. Even coming up here was researched to death, every detail controlled.
And look where that got me. Sitting in a freezing cabin at dawn, still seeing guns that aren't there.
"This is insane," I say, standing up.
"Probably."
"You're insane."
"Already established that."
I pull off my jacket, then my sweater, and I can feel his eyes on me, but I don't let myself think about it. I'm not thinking about anything. I'm just doing.
Boots off. Socks off. I hesitate at my jeans, then figure what the hell, my thermal shirt is long enough to be decent, and my underwear isn't that different from a bathing suit anyway. The jeans come off.
"Hannah—"
"Shut up. If I think about this, I'm going to chicken out."
I don't let myself hesitate. Don't let myself calculate the temperature or worry about what I look like or think about anything except the water and the jump and the absolute insanity of what I'm about to do.
I run.
The rock is cold under my bare feet. The air is sharp in my lungs. And then I'm jumping, and for one perfect second I'm weightless, suspended between the rock and the water, between fear and freedom, between who I was and who I might be.
Then I hit the water and every thought in my head disappears in a shock of cold. I surface gasping, my whole body screaming at me that this was a terrible idea, that I need to get out now, that I'm going to die of hypothermia in this stupid waterfall in the middle of nowhere.
But Griffin is laughing, a sound I didn't think he was capable of, and somehow that makes it better.
"Told you it was cold," he says.
"You—asshole—you said—" I can barely get the words out through my gasping and the chattering of my teeth. "You said it was fifty degrees!"
"I said probably. I didn't say it was a good probably."
I splash water at him, which is stupid because we're both already soaking wet, but it feels good anyway. He splashes back, and suddenly we're in a full-on splash fight, both of us laughing like idiots, the cold forgotten in the sheer absurdity of it all.
When we finally stop, both of us are breathing hard, and I realize something.
I'm not thinking about the gun.
I'm not replaying the robbery.
I'm just... here. In this moment. Freezing my ass off in a mountain pool with a man I barely know, and I feel more alive than I have in weeks.
"You're right," I say, still catching my breath.
"About what?"
"I needed this."
He nods, pushing wet hair out of his face. "Yeah. I know."