Chapter Eight
Abigail
By eight o’clock the next morning, the air in the valley was already thick enough to chew. The sun crested the eastern ridge of the Bitterroot Mountains not with the gentle, rosy warmth of a summer dawn, but with a harsh, blazing intensity that promised misery.
Abby lay on her back inside the tent, staring up at the nylon ceiling.
The fabric was baking, trapping the heat and turning her shelter into a slow cooker.
Her clothes, the same yoga pants, now torn and stained with dried blood and dirt, and a moisture-wicking tank top that had long since stopped wicking anything, clung to her skin.
She couldn’t and didn’t want to know what she smelled like.
She felt like something that had been chewed up and spat out by the forest. She had brought her duffle bag filled with clothes, but she hadn’t paid any attention to what she had been throwing in there and ended up with one pair of jeans and about ten tank tops.
She craved the clean jeans, but her knee wouldn’t fit in them; it was still too swollen.
Yet, as she slowly pushed herself up onto her elbows, a strange, undeniable spark of defiance flickered in her chest.
She was still here.
Her right leg throbbed with a deep, heavy ache that radiated from her kneecap down to her ankle.
The bruise had blossomed into a spectacular, ugly canvas of black, indigo, and sickly yellow, shades of which she didn’t think she had ever seen in nature.
The skin felt tight, stretched over the swelling, but the jagged laceration itself was clean.
The butterfly closures from the anonymous medical pouch were holding perfectly.
The angry, radiating heat of infection that had terrified her yesterday was completely gone, neutralized by the heavy-duty antibiotics she had forced down her dry throat.
Whoever had left that kit on her cooler: a passing hiker, a hunter, a ghost…
had saved her leg. And the fact that they hadn't stuck around, hadn't demanded thanks or tried to engage her, told her one critical thing: she was still essentially alone.
She had been granted a reprieve, a tool to keep fighting, but the fight was still entirely hers.
Abby dragged herself toward the zipper of the tent, moving with agonizing slowness.
Every shift of her weight required a conscious negotiation with her pain receptors.
She unzipped the flap and pushed her head outside, instantly hit by the wall of stagnant, pine-scented heat.
The cicadas were already screaming in the canopy above, a relentless, vibrating drone that set her teeth on edge.
She grabbed her makeshift birch crutch from where it lay in the dirt, hauled herself upright, and leaned heavily against the trunk of the nearest pine tree.
Water, her brain demanded, a primal, rhythmic chant. Water. Water. Water.
She looked at her three plastic bottles sitting by the latched cooler. Two were completely empty. The third held a pathetic, shallow puddle at the bottom. The antibiotics were doing their job, but they were also stripping her body of moisture, leaving her mouth tasting like copper and old dust.
She cast her gaze down the slope toward the creek.
In the harsh morning light, the hundred-yard descent looked like a sheer cliff face.
The exposed roots seemed to coil like snakes, waiting to trip her, and the slick patches of pine straw were basically landmines for her unstable knee.
She had barely made it back up yesterday.
Doing it again today, with the ambient temperature already pushing ninety degrees, felt like a suicide mission.
"Okay," Abby rasped aloud, her voice cracking. "Okay, think. You managed crises for a living. Manage this."
She closed her eyes, trying to summon the sharp, analytical edge that had made her a rising star in the corporate world. But her brain felt sluggish, mired in a fog of dehydration and lingering trauma. When she reached for her corporate logic, all she found were the echoes of the life she had fled.
She remembered sitting in her corner office overlooking downtown Los Angeles.
The air conditioning was always set to a crisp sixty-eight degrees.
She remembered David standing in her doorway, checking his Rolex, his expression tight with annoyance because she was ten minutes late for a dinner reservation with a prospective client.
“You have to compartmentalize, Abby,” David had told her, his tone condescendingly smooth. “Stop letting the little things derail your focus. It’s just stress. Everyone deals with it.”
But it wasn't just stress. It was a complete, neurological collapse.
It was waking up at three in the morning unable to breathe, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
It was the sudden, terrifying inability to read a simple spreadsheet because the numbers looked like a foreign language.
It was the realization that she had spent thirty years building a life that looked perfect on paper, only to realize she was entirely hollow inside.
She opened her eyes, blinking away the stinging sweat. She wasn't in Los Angeles. David wasn't here. There were no spreadsheets. There was only the slope, the heat, and the necessity of water.
She reached for the heavy canister of bear spray sitting on the lid of her cooler and clipped it to her waistband. She grabbed the two empty bottles. She gripped her birch crutch.
One step, she told herself. Just take one—
The sound hit her before the vibration did.
It was a low, mechanical growl, distant at first, but rapidly growing louder. It wasn't the wind. It wasn't an animal. It was an engine.
Abby froze, her heart stalling in her chest and then leaping into a frantic, terrified gallop. The drone of the cicadas seemed to drop away, replaced by the grinding, guttural roar of a heavy-duty motor tearing through the dense woods.
It was coming from the old logging trail. The same trail she had driven down.
Panic, cold and sharp, flooded her veins, temporarily overriding the pain in her knee. She was three miles off the main highway, isolated, injured, and completely vulnerable. And someone was coming.
She dropped the plastic water bottles. Her hand flew to her hip, her fingers wrapping around the thick plastic grip of the bear spray.
She pulled it free, her thumb hovering over the safety latch.
She hobbled backward, putting the heavy plastic cooler between herself and the tree line where the trail ended, her chest heaving as she dragged oxygen into her tight lungs.
The roar of the engine grew deafening. She could hear the snap of heavy branches and the crunch of tires on dry earth.
A massive, four-wheel-drive ATV broke through the thick brush at the edge of the clearing. It was dark green, coated in a layer of pale dust, and strapped with heavy black equipment boxes on the front and rear racks.
The rider hit the brakes, the thick, knobby tires skidding slightly in the dirt before the machine came to a halt. He reached down and cut the engine.
The sudden silence was ringing and violent.
Abby stood frozen behind the cooler, leaning heavily on her crutch, the bear spray leveled directly at the center of the rider's chest. Her hands were shaking so violently she could barely keep the canister straight.
The man swung his long leg over the seat and stepped off the ATV.
He was huge. Easily over six feet tall, with broad, heavy shoulders stretching the fabric of a faded, red-and-black flannel shirt that had the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.
He wore worn, grease-stained denim jeans and heavy leather work boots.
A dark baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes, shading his face from the harsh sun.
He didn't immediately move toward her. He stood perfectly still by the ATV, his hands resting loosely on his hips, his posture relaxed, deliberately non-threatening.
Then, he slowly reached up and pulled the baseball cap off.
Abby let out a shaky exhale.
It was him.
The stormy, piercing grey eyes. The close-cropped dark hair. The rugged, stoic jawline. It was the man from the general store. The stranger who had dropped the bear spray and the water filter into her cart.
"Easy," the man said. His voice was a deep, resonant rumble, calm and steady. He raised his hands, palms facing outward, showing they were empty. "Easy there. I'm not looking for trouble."
"Stop right there," Abby choked out, her voice trembling but finding its edge. She kept the bear spray locked on him. "Don't take another step."
He didn't move. He stood with a stillness that was unnatural for a man of his size. His eyes flicked down to the canister in her hands, then to the jagged, bruised ruin of her knee, and finally back up to her face.
"You're the guy from the store," Abby said, her mind spinning wildly. "Did you follow me?"
"No," he said calmly, not taking his eyes off hers. "My name is Will. Will Hammond. I’m the property owner. I’m checking the fences, clearing the deadfall for fire hazards.
" He gestured loosely to the dense woods around them.
"You're camped on private property, ma'am.
You're about three miles over the boundary line. "
Abby stared at him, the words struggling to penetrate the roaring adrenaline in her ears. Private property. Property owner. Checking fences. It made a horrifying kind of sense. She hadn't looked at a map. She hadn't checked for markers. She had just driven until the road ended.
"I... I didn't know," she stammered, her defensive posture faltering slightly. "There weren't any signs."
"Signs get blown down in the winter storms," Will replied smoothly, his tone conversational. "I was running the perimeter line this morning and saw the tire tracks on the logging spur. Figured a hiker got turned around."
He paused, a faint, almost imperceptible look of recognition crossing his features. "Didn't expect to see the girl from the general store."