6. Zoe
Zoe
The panic attack starts with my hands.
Not with a thought or a memory or the wind changing direction.
It starts in my fingers. A tingling that begins at the tips and crawls upward through my palms and into my wrists.
I'm sitting on the bed, propped against the headboard with a cup of tea between my hands.
Real tea. Chamomile, from a box in the pantry that Ryker said has been there since his mother sent it two Christmases ago.
One second I'm fine. Or whatever passes for fine on day three of living in a stranger's cabin.
The next second my hands are buzzing and the cup feels like it isn't real.
I set it down on the side table carefully because I know what comes next.
It comes fast. The tingling shoots up both arms and blooms across my chest like a hand pressing flat against my sternum.
My throat tightens. Not gradually. Like something that was already closed and I'm only now noticing.
I can't swallow. I try and the muscles just clench and hold.
The failure to swallow sends a signal to my brain that I'm choking and suddenly I can't breathe either.
I'm not choking. I know I'm not. There's nothing in my throat and air is moving in and out of my lungs in short, rapid bursts that I can hear but can't feel.
But my body doesn't care what my brain knows.
Right now the equation says danger, you're dying, everything you see is a lie.
The room changes. Not literally. The walls don't move and the fire doesn't shift.
But the quality of it changes. The edges of things soften.
The colors flatten. The distance between me and the fireplace stretches and compresses in a way that makes my stomach lurch.
My peripheral vision darkens and narrows until I'm seeing the world through a tunnel.
Just the quilt. Just my hands on the quilt.
Just the patch of blue fabric between my fingers going in and out of focus with each shallow, useless breath.
I know what this is. I've had them before.
In the shipping container. In the locked cabin.
Once in the diner bathroom before any of this happened, crouched on the tile floor because a customer raised his voice and something inside me tripped a wire I didn't know was there.
Panic attacks. From the inside they feel like dying with your eyes open.
Your body becomes a stranger that has decided to kill you system by system.
First sensation, then vision, then air, then the final trick where your sense of reality detaches and you're watching yourself fall apart from a distance.
That's where I am now. Watching myself from somewhere slightly above and to the left. The woman on the bed with the trembling hands and the shallow breathing and the eyes that have gone too wide. That's me, but also not me.
"Zoe."
The voice reaches me through layers. Far away. Muffled. But I know the frequency. Low. Steady. The voice for injured things.
"You're having a panic attack. Your body is doing what bodies do when the nervous system gets overwhelmed.
It's flooding you with adrenaline and cortisol and sending false alarm signals.
Nothing is actually wrong. Nothing is happening to you right now.
The feeling is real but the danger isn't. Can you look at me? "
I try. My eyes are jerking around the room, scanning for exits and threats, and I have to fight to make them land on him.
He's across the room by the kitchen counter.
Same deliberate stillness. His hands are flat on the counter, fingers spread, like he's showing me they're empty and not going to reach for me.
"Good. Keep your eyes on me. I want you to breathe with me. In through the nose for four counts. Ready? One. Two. Three. Four."
I try. The air goes in like swallowing glass but it goes in.
"Hold for four. One. Two. Three. Four. Now out through the mouth, slow, like you're blowing on soup that's too hot. One. Two. Three. Four."
The image of blowing on soup is so ordinary that something in my brain snags on it.
Soup is not an emergency. Soup is a Tuesday.
My lungs find the pattern on the second cycle, then the third, and each breath pushes back the tunnel vision by a fraction.
The room widens from a pinpoint back toward something that has walls and corners and a man standing in it counting numbers.
It takes seven cycles. By the fifth, the tingling in my hands has receded to my fingertips. By the sixth, I can swallow again and the relief of that almost makes me cry. By the seventh, the room is the room again. Solid. Real. I am here and not floating above here.
"There you go," Ryker says. He hasn't moved. His hands are still flat on the counter. "That's the worst of it. The shakiness is going to hang around for a while. That's just the adrenaline working through your system. It'll pass. You did good."
"I did good?" My voice sounds shredded. "I just had a panic attack because I was drinking tea. Tea. The least threatening beverage in the world. Chamomile. It's literally called sleepy tea by some brands. I was defeated by sleepy tea."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile, but close.
"In fairness," he says, "that chamomile is two years old. It might actually be dangerous at this point."
I stare at him. He stares back, completely deadpan. And something bubbles up from deep inside me, from underneath the panic and the fear and the eight days of survival and everything that came before. Something that has no business existing in this moment.
I laugh.
It's an awful sound at first. Rusty and thin and scraped raw.
It startles me so badly that I clap my hand over my mouth.
But the sound won't stop. It builds and then it breaks through and I'm laughing in a way that hurts my ribs and makes my eyes water.
Nothing like the polite quiet laugh I used to offer customers at the diner.
Everything like the laugh of a person who has been so far past the edge that the only response left is the absurd.
"Defeated by sleepy tea," I say again, and the words are so stupid and so funny that they make me laugh harder.
And then Ryker laughs.
Not a chuckle. Not the low controlled sound I might have expected.
A real laugh. Short and surprised and slightly helpless, like it escaped before he could catch it.
It changes his whole face. The hard lines around his eyes soften.
The perpetual assessment in his expression breaks for just a moment into something younger and less guarded.
He catches himself. Clears his throat. The seriousness comes back. But the laugh happened and we both know it and the room feels different now. Not safe, not yet, but survivable.
"How often do those happen?" he asks. Back to business, but his voice is warmer by a degree. "The panic attacks."
"More since everything. But they happened before, too.
I had my first one when I was nineteen. My parents had been gone about a few years and I was alone in their house packing boxes for Goodwill and I found my mom's reading glasses in the junk drawer.
Just sitting there between a roll of tape and some dead batteries.
And my body just stopped working properly. "
He nods. The kind of nod that means he's putting the piece somewhere specific.
"You don't have to stay over there," I say. It comes out before I think about it, and the boldness of it makes my face heat. "I mean, you can sit. If you want. You've been standing at that counter like you're guarding it from me."
Another small movement at the corner of his mouth. He crosses the room slowly and sits in the chair beside the bed. The one from the first night.
"Tell me something," I say. The panic attack has left me wrung out but also strangely loose. "Something that isn't about my case or my ankle or my caloric intake. Something real. About you."
He's quiet for a long moment. The fire pops. The wind shoves at the cabin. I watch him decide something.
"I have a team," he says finally. "Five guys.
We served together before any of us wore a badge and we went into the Marshals together because Mason, the one I called this morning, said the job needed people who could work the kind of country that maps don't cover.
Mountains, backcountry, places where federal jurisdiction runs up against geography and geography wins.
We've been working cases together for the better part of a decade. "
"That's a fact," I say. "Not a something. Tell me a something."
He looks at me with the faint echo of surprise, the same expression he had when I told him about the cherry pie tips.
"All right." He leans back in the chair and stretches his legs out.
"A something. We were in the Bitterroots.
Those are the mountains on the Montana-Idaho border, some of the roughest country in the lower forty-eight.
We'd been tracking a fugitive for six days.
This guy had skipped on a federal weapons charge and gone deep into the backcountry with a three-day head start and enough survival training to make it interesting. "
"Day four, Mason took a fall. Bad trail, loose scree, went over the edge of a switchback and dropped about fifteen feet into a ravine.
Broke two ribs and fractured his left wrist, which for most people would mean calling for extraction.
Mason braced the wrist with a SAM splint and two sticks, taped his ribs with athletic tape, and told us that if we radioed for a helicopter he would personally throw the radio off the mountain.
Then he hiked another twenty-one miles over two days on broken ribs to help us run the fugitive to ground.
When we finally caught the guy, Mason was the one who put the cuffs on.
Left-handed, because his right wrist was the broken one.
The fugitive looked at him and said, 'You look worse than I do.
' And Mason said, 'Yeah, but I'm not the one in handcuffs.
' Then he sat down on a rock and passed out for four hours straight while we waited for the extraction team. "
I realize my mouth is slightly open. I close it. "He hiked twenty-one miles on broken ribs because he didn't want to call for help?"
"He hiked twenty-one miles on broken ribs because calling for help would have meant pulling off the pursuit, and pulling off meant the fugitive crossed the border into Idaho where a different jurisdictional team would have taken the case.
Mason started the chase. Mason wanted to finish the chase.
That's who he is. Once he's got his teeth in something, the only way to get him off it is to wait until the thing is done. "
"That's either very impressive or completely insane."
"Most of us land somewhere between both. Occupational hazard."
I pull the quilt tighter and try to imagine a life where hiking twenty-one miles on broken ribs is a story you tell casually.
I can't. My world before Tyler was small and soft.
Diner shifts and animal mugs and secondhand curtains.
The worst physical hardship I'd experienced was a double shift during the summer tourist rush with a blister on my heel.
And then the wilderness happened, and eight days happened, and it turned out my body could do things I'd never imagined.
"The man you caught," I say. "The fugitive. Was he like Tyler?"
Ryker's expression shifts. A tightening around the eyes. "No. Different kind of monster. Weapons trafficking, not people. But the mountains don't care about the distinction. They're just the place where people go when they don't want to be found."
"And you're the person who finds them."
"That's the idea."
I look at his face in the firelight and try to reconcile all the versions of him I've seen in three days.
The tracker who read my trail through the woods.
The medic who wrapped my ankle. The man who fed a fire all night so I wouldn't wake up cold.
The voice that counted breathing cycles while I fell apart over chamomile tea.
The laugh that cracked the seriousness for just long enough to show me what was underneath.
"Ryker?"
"Yeah."
"The sleepy tea really is terrible, by the way. I didn't want to say anything, but it tastes like hot water filtered through a sock."
The corner of his mouth moves again. This time it makes it all the way to something that could almost be called a smile. "Noted. I'll tell my mother."
"Don't you dare. If she's anything like my mom was, she'll just send more, and then I'll have to drink it out of obligation, and the cycle continues."
He looks at me. The almost-smile holds. And something passes between us. Not romantic. Not loaded. Just warmth. The uncomplicated warmth of two people finding that they can make each other laugh.
The storm presses against the cabin. The fire crackles.
The terrible chamomile tea sits on the side table, abandoned and cooling.
Neither of us reaches for it. Neither of us mentions moving.
And for the first time since I walked through that door unconscious in his arms, the room begins to feel like a place where something other than survival might be possible.