Chapter 3
Isla
My four-thirty alarm went off two hours ago and I slept through it.
I roll over in the guest room bed and grab my phone off the nightstand. Six-fourteen. I type a text to Steel before my eyes focus all the way.
Did you feed the hawk? Owl splint?
The reply comes in under ten seconds.
Tom: Hawk fed at four-thirty and six-thirty. Owl is stable. Anything else, or can I drink my coffee?
I stare at the screen. He fed the hawk twice, which means he set two alarms overnight, got up in the dark, warmed the Carnivore Care to body temperature, and tube-fed a bird that bites everyone who touches it.
And then he went back to sleep and did it again two hours later. And he's giving me grief about it.
I type back: Thank you.
Tom: Go back to sleep.
I don't go back to sleep, but I don't get up either.
I lie here with my phone on my chest and the wool blanket pulled to my chin and the guest room quiet around me, and something in my body has let go overnight.
Somewhere in the dark my muscles unclenched.
My jaw loosened. The locked door and the compound walls and the blanket that smells like cedar did something my own property hasn't managed in months.
I sit up. Steel's shirt hangs off my shoulder, the collar stretched wide from a frame twice my size, the hem pooled across my thighs.
I packed two changes of clothes Monday night in the dark.
I pull the shirt over my head, fold it, and set it on the pillow.
Then I dress in my own jeans and flannel and stand in front of the guest room mirror long enough to twist my hair back and decide that looking human isn't worth the extra five minutes.
The hallway is quiet. I take the stairs down to the common area, and the smell of eggs and coffee hits me on the landing.
Morgan stands at the kitchen counter cracking eggs into a skillet, one hand on the spatula, her pregnant belly angled away from the burner. Toast on a plate, fruit cut in a bowl, two bottles of water lined up beside the stove.
"Morning." She glances over her shoulder. "Sit down, food's almost done."
"You don't have to do that," I say from the doorway.
"The eggs are from Nina's chickens and the bread is from Claire's bakery and I already started, so sit." She doesn't look up from the skillet. "How'd you sleep?"
"Good, actually. First decent sleep I've had in months. I even slept past six, which I don't think I've done since I opened the center."
"Good." She slides eggs onto a plate and sets it in front of the chair closest to me.
"I didn't sleep past five-thirty for the first eight months after Ben died.
Then I moved into the apartment above The Greenhouse and Chain fixed the lock and something in me just let go.
I hated that someone else fixing a lock on my door made me sleep better than I had in years. Like admitting I needed it."
I look at her.
"Eat your eggs," she says.
The eggs are better than anything I've made in months, which isn't saying much because I eat standing up at the intake counter most mornings, usually something from a can.
Morgan pours me coffee without asking and it's good, better than the sludge I reheat four times at home, and I drink half of it before I notice she's eating toast off the plate she made for me.
"So, what's your story?" she asks as she eats.
"I worked at an environmental consulting firm in Seattle," I say. "For eleven years."
She stops mid-bite.
"They rewrote one of my impact assessments—a coastal development I'd flagged as high-risk. Put my name on conclusions I never wrote and greenlit the project. When I pushed back, they restructured my role and offered severance with an NDA."
"And you took it?"
"Yeah, I really hated how controlling they were so I took the check and drove north until I ended up here."
Jess comes in through the side door with a baby on her hip. She looks me over once, top to bottom.
"What happened to your hand?"
I hold it up. The tape across the hawk bite has peeled back, the skin underneath bruised purple and swollen around the puncture.
"Hawk bit me Monday during a feeding. He's got opinions about the tube."
"Change that today. Steel's got gauze and antiseptic in the garage. Don't want it getting infected and you lose a hand."
"Yes, ma'am."
She shifts the baby to her other hip as he grabs a fistful of her hair. She nods at the plate. "Enjoy breakfast and welcome." And then she's gone, door closing behind her.
I finish the eggs and let Morgan take the last slice without a word.
Tom finds me after breakfast.
"The guest rooms don't lock from the inside." He stands in the doorway. "My apartment has a deadbolt and a chain. You take the bedroom. I'll take the couch."
I stare at him.
"It also has a coffee maker," he says.
I'll take it. Not because of the coffee maker, though the coffee maker doesn't hurt. Because fighting about sleeping arrangements while someone out there knows my routine, my camera placements, and the dead zones on my property seems like a waste of energy I don't have.
"Fine, you sold me at the coffee machine."
His apartment sits at the end of the hall past the guest rooms. It has a kitchenette, a small lounge with a couch, and a bedroom through the far door.
Medical texts sit on a shelf along one wall, field guides along another, a handful of novels in German and something with Cyrillic characters.
A spare pair of wire-rimmed glasses sit on the nightstand.
On the bookshelf, between a field surgical manual and a German paperback: a framed photograph, face-down. I can see the cardboard backing and the stand folded flat.
I don't turn it over. Everybody's got a photograph they can't look at and can't throw away. That's not mine to touch.
That afternoon, Tom drives me back to the property. My truck sits by the intake building on four new tires. Garrett trailered it back that morning, new rubber on the club's tab.
"I'm paying for those," I tell Tom.
"Take it up with Knox."
I already know how that conversation will end.
The animals that need constant care come with us: the juvenile hawk in his travel cage screaming the entire drive, the barred owl sedated and wrapped for transport, the fox kit born too late in the season with a respiratory infection that needs nebulizer treatments every day.
He lifts the hawk cage into the truck bed, and the hawk strikes at the wire hard enough to rattle the latch.
A quick pull back before its beak connects. He's done this before.
"Red-tailed hawk, juvenile male, approximate age fourteen weeks," he says, reading the intake card I taped to the cage.
The fawns and the second-year raptors in outdoor flight cages are moved to a property near Garrett's cabin. A place with acreage and someone who knows how to keep water bowls filled and fences checked.
The fox family denning under the old-growth stump stays.
The sick kit in the truck is one of theirs—the runt I pulled three weeks ago when she stopped gaining weight.
Her littermates are still in there, four of them, healthy and wild.
If I send a crew in with crates, the vixen bolts before anyone gets within ten feet.
The kits scatter into the woods. And relocated vixens abandon dens—every study I've read says the same thing.
You move a wild fox and she stops being a mother.
I already took the one I could save. The rest stay wild. That's the job.
My property looks wrong without animals in it. Like a house with no furniture. The mews sit empty. The fawn pen holds clean straw and nothing else. The intake building lock holds firm when I test it but the building behind it feels hollow.
The fox family is still under the stump. The only living things left on this property, and the ones I can't put in a crate and carry.
I get in the truck. Tom starts the engine and I don't look back because if I look back I'll want to stay, and staying means sleeping alone on property where someone cut my tires and left dead coyotes at my gate.
The hawk screams all the way back to the compound. I tell him to knock it off, but he just ignores me.
Wednesday morning. A motorcycle pulls into the compound lot while I'm standing at the apartment window with a mug from Tom's French press, which I will never tell him is better than the pot downstairs.
The rider swings off and pulls his helmet, and I recognize Hunter from the compound photos on the hallway wall. Orc, tall, sun-worn, a backpack slung over one shoulder. He drops the bag by the door, scans the lot, and heads straight for his bike again within ten minutes.
Knox leans against the garage bay. I hear him say, "You just got here."
"I'm just going to grab a coffee."
"There's coffee in the kitchen."
Hunter doesn't answer. He swings a leg over the bike and the engine turns.
"Say hi to Claire for us," Knox calls after him.
Hunter's hand tightens on the throttle, but he doesn't say anything about it. He pulls out of the lot and turns toward town. Knox shakes his head and goes back inside.
I stand at the apartment window holding my mug and think about a man who rides past a full coffee pot to get to a bakery twenty minutes away. Not that I can talk.
That evening, in the garage.
Tom's workspace runs the back wall, a long wooden bench with a pegboard above it, gauze and tape and scissors and antiseptic hung on labeled hooks, two sizes of surgical clamps, a suture kit at the far end.
The first time I saw this layout at a drop-off, it mirrored the way I organize my intake cages.
"Let me see your hand," he says.
I hold it out. The hawk bite from Monday has turned a deep purple around the puncture, and the tape I've changed twice won't hold against the swelling.
He pulls a stool over and sits me on the workbench. My feet hang off the edge. He stands in front of me with the antiseptic and fresh gauze and doesn't speak while he works.
He peels the old tape. Cleans the puncture with antiseptic on a cotton pad, pressing firm enough to flush the wound and light enough that I don't pull away, his mouth goes flat while he works, focused, not looking at me.
He dries the skin around the bite and cuts a new strip of gauze and begins taping it in place, his fingers covering my entire hand.
His glasses slip down his nose.
It happens fast—the frames hit a patch of fur at the wrong angle and slide, and he can't push them back because both of his hands hold my bandage in place. He tilts his head, trying to resettle them, and they slide further.
I reach up and push them back onto the bridge of his nose.
My fingertip lands on the warm bone between his eyes, and his glasses settle under my touch, his whole body locks.
I feel his purr through the workbench before I hear it.
Not the buried tremor from Monday night.
This one fills the garage. The wooden bench hums under my legs.
The tools on the pegboard rattle against their hooks.
His chest rumbles with a sound so low it sits in the base of my spine rather than my ears.
He catches my wrist.
Not hard. His fingers close around the bone and stop, and the grip has the tension of a man holding himself back from leaning into my palm.
His thumb finds my pulse point and presses, and we both know what my heart rate looks like right now because my blood hammers against his thumb hard enough that he can probably count the beats without trying.
He sets my hand down on the bench, finishes the bandage, and steps back.
"Keep it dry."
I nod.
Neither of us mentions it. He cleans his supplies, returns each one to its labeled hook. I slide off the workbench and walk back across the lot to his apartment in the compound. The night air hits the back of my neck. I press my bandaged hand against my chest and feel my heartbeat still pounding.
I lie in his bed at midnight with my phone on my chest. The room smells like Tom and the bed holds the impression of someone taller than me.
I open my voicemails. Twelve saved messages from the same number. Thomas's name beside each one—not Steel, Thomas—and every message dated and filed in chronological order because I keep everything organized and labeled.
I press play on the oldest one. Two years ago, the first hawk he brought me.
His voice comes through steady and warm. "Isla, it's Thomas. I've got a juvenile Cooper's hawk on the shoulder of Route 4, looks like a wing injury. I've got her wrapped and stable. I can bring her in tonight if you've got cage space. Let me know."
He says Cooper's hawk the way some men say a woman's name. Like it matters enough to get right.
I listen to the whole message. I play it again.
I hold the phone against my chest and close my eyes and the room sits lonely around me: the tight-cornered bed, the face-down photograph on the bookshelf, the glasses case on the nightstand, the field guides lined up by height on a shelf where someone put everything in its place and left no room for anyone else.
Two years of his handwriting in a folder I labeled Intake Records because the honest label would have scared the hell out of me.
I know what drawer he belongs in. I've known since the night he texted me about a raccoon on Route 4 at eleven PM and I sat up in bed and smiled at my phone in the dark like a woman who has already fallen and just hasn't told anyone yet.
I press play on the second message. I listen to his voice say the species name, and I fall asleep with the phone against my chest and the bed holding me in a room that smells like a man I pretend not to love.