Chapter 6
Chapter Six
The room exhaled like a punctured tire.
Everett took the lantern.
Harper pulled his jacket tighter around her shoulders.
The heavy canvas smelled of rain and the woodsy soap he’d used for two decades. The scent tugged at something she had tried to bury.
Don’t let a smell undo you.
She focused on the logistics. Slick mud, dangerous machinery, limited visibility. Problems she could solve.
Cal waved Harper and Everett toward the back exit. “Straight down the path, then left at the big pine. You’ll see the green metal roof.”
Everett glanced at Harper. “Ready?”
“No,” she said honestly. “Let’s go.”
Outside, the storm was ferocious. The path streamed with water, gravel slick beneath their boots.
“You okay?” he shouted over the wind.
“Not remotely!”
The gale-force winds hit them like a physical blow, stealing the air from her lungs. The weather was loud and violent and honest, unlike the suffocating quiet back in the lodge. She didn’t need him worrying about her. She needed the lights repaired.
“There,” he shouted over the storm. “Just a few more yards.”
If this is the universe’s idea of a bonding experience, I’d like to formally request annihilation instead.
Her boots were squelching, her hair plastered to her skull, and she wasn’t dressed for a monsoon. They reached the generator shed. The roar of the storm muffled instantly as they stepped inside. The sudden drop in volume made the small space feel suffocating.
Diesel fumes. Wet wool. Him.
She longed to relax.
Distance. Maintain distance.
He gave her a brief look.
Don’t get wistful now. You broke that.
“Can you fix this?” she asked.
He crouched and opened the side panel.
“It’s full of fuel. Pressure’s fine. Line’s clogged.”
No hesitation. No dramatics. Just competence.
If you’d approached our marriage like you approach engines… she cut the thought off.
When the valve stuck, she automatically braced the metal frame without being asked. Her fingers brushed his wrist.
“You always could fix everything except—”
She stopped.
The words slipped out.
He didn’t react outwardly.
“Hold this,” Everett murmured.
She did.
It was terrifyingly easy.
They fell into a rhythm.
Angle. Pressure. Timing.
We fit. That’s the problem.
Her hand rested briefly on his wrist.
She snatched it away.
Stop it.
The generator coughed once, twice, then roared to life, filling the shed with a deep, steady thrum.
Harper jumped at the sound, a startled breath escaping her. She exhaled, relief loosening her shoulders. “There it is.”
Everett grinned, wide, honest, boyish.
“You did it,” she said, almost grudgingly.
“We did it.”
The word we lodged deep. He emphasized it as if he could hand it to her. We. It lodged in her chest like shrapnel. Once upon a time, we meant home.
There was no more we.
He studied her briefly.
She stiffened under it. Don’t look at me like I’m something salvageable.
It tugged at a thread in her chest she’d thought severed. His left hand quivered, just for a second, against his thigh, and she realized he was barely holding it together. The crack in his composure undid something in her she couldn’t afford to lose.
Why didn’t you fight for us? The question crowded behind her teeth, desperate and pathetic. She swallowed it back. She didn’t want his admiration, only his signature on the settlement papers.
Everett observed her with something quiet and reverent in his eyes. Suddenly, the shed was smaller. The storm was louder. The air between them felt charged.
Harper looked away.
Everett pushed the shed door open. Together they stepped back into the raging storm to return to the lodge.
Outside, the wind had intensified. The rain pelted them sideways. Everett was already moving up the path. The hike back was exhausting, fighting for every step against the wet wind.
Inside the lodge, the lights flickered, then hummed steadily to life. A cheer erupted. Now that the generator was working.
She stood by the fireplace, letting it defrost her cold limbs.
Then she moved, careful, controlled, taking the chair farthest from him.
Close enough to share heat.
Far enough to maintain boundaries.
The fire crackled between them.
He leaned back in his chair, head tipping against the cushion, eyes closing for a moment as if the weight of the day had finally settled into his bones.
The surrender in his posture threw her off balance. It forced her to look at him not as the opposing party in a lawsuit, but as a man who was profoundly tired.
Harper watched him. Her thoughts drifted back to the shed. The rain. The way their hands moved blindly. How instinctive it felt to brace the panel for him, how instinctive it felt for him to reach back and steady her.
Shared history is a traitor. That’s all it was: a physiological response to crisis, the body recalling a rhythm it had practiced for two decades.
It shouldn’t count as intimacy. It was logistics.
Efficiency. And yet, the ease of it, the way they slotted together like gears of a well-oiled machine, terrified her more than the storm itself.
It was inconvenient evidence that they still worked, at least when the world was falling apart.
They were a storm unto themselves. And tonight they were in the eye of it.
But the eye is deceptive. It’s calm, sure, but it’s surrounded by destruction, and she can’t afford to forget the winds waiting on the perimeter. If she stays in this warm, quiet center for too long, she’ll forget why she built the shelter.
Everett broke the silence again, voice low and threadbare, she could hear all the places where his usual certainty had worn thin, could map the holes like she once mapped the freckles on his back.
“Harper… I meant what I said. Earlier. About trying.”
She stared at him. She wanted him gone and wanted him to stay. Both truths existed in the same breath, and she hated him for making her hold both at once.
“You said a lot of things earlier.”
Adrenaline talks. Fear talks. People make promises in the dark they’d never sign in the harsh light of a courtroom. She needed him to be quiet, to stop peeling back the layers she’s carefully glued down.
He lifted his head, and she watched his throat work as he swallowed, gathering courage she didn’t want him to have. When he met her eyes across the low firelight, his fingers gripped the chair arm like he was bracing for impact.
The silence filled with the pop of burning wood, with her own heartbeat thundering in her ears, with the sound of his breathing that she still knows by heart.
It’s the look he used to give her when he had a plan. The one that said he’s solved the equation and needs her to check his math. But she’s not his partner anymore; she’s the problem he’s trying to solve, and she refused to be a variable he can adjust until the output suits him.
The weight of his gaze settled on her skin like a brand, and she knew it would still burn there long after he was gone.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t rewrite this.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” she snapped quietly, jaw clenched so hard her molars ached. “You’re remembering the good and forgetting that we burned ourselves out fighting. That you shut down. That I shut down. That we hurt each other every day.”
Nostalgia is a liar. It smooths over the jagged edges of three years of silence and presents a highlight reel that never actually existed.
If she lets him spin a new narrative now, one where a fixed generator equates to a fixed marriage, she’ll lose the only thing she has left: the certainty that leaving was the right choice.
She needs the facts to stay cold and hard. She needs the history to remain broken.
“I remember,” he said, throat working soundlessly before the words came. “Believe me, I remember the bad.”
She pressed her lips together, breath held until her lungs burned. “Then don’t make this storm into something it isn’t.”
Don’t make it a sign. Don’t make it fate.
It’s just low pressure and high winds, and a coincidence.
If she acknowledged it as anything else, she opened the door to hope, and hope felt like a dangerous loosening in her chest, a warmth that terrified her because she hadn’t felt it in so long she forgot how much it could hurt.
Everett’s expression shattered. His hand reached halfway toward her before he caught himself, fingers curling into his palm. He blinked once, twice, too many times, like he’s trying to reset his face.
She had to go. Before the cracks in his composure trigger the cracks in hers. She could handle his stubbornness; handle his silence. But she couldn’t handle his devastation because part of her still wanted to fix it, and that impulse is a liability she can’t afford.
“I’m going back to the cabin,” she said, voice scraping thin.
Everett rose too, but doesn’t step closer. “Harper—”
“Don’t make this something,” she said again, softer this time. Pleading. “I can’t… not tonight.”
Not tonight, because tonight she’s tired, and the storm was rattling the windows, and his voice sounded like it did when he used to talk to her in bed before everything went silent. Tonight her defenses feel tissue-thin.
He stopped. Nodded. Let her go.
She turned and walked out of the main lodge and trudged back to the shared cabin without looking back.
He was right behind her as she stepped into the little wooden house. She was wet, tired, and cold. She hadn’t even realized until the warmth of the room against her wet cheeks stung.
Everett noticed immediately. “You should shower first.”
He was right, which was irritating. He stepped into the lead again, assessing the situation and deploying resources while she tried to stop her teeth from clicking together.
It was annoying how easily he slipped back into the role of partner, as if the last three years of silence were a long weekend.
Harper pushed the bathroom door closed behind her.