8. Zoe
Zoe
Ryker goes out for his morning perimeter check and I explore the cabin the way a person reads a diary they found in a drawer. Carefully. Guiltily. Unable to stop.
He's been going out twice a day since the tracks. He doesn't say it's because of the tracks. He says it's routine, part of storm management. But the rifle goes with him now, and when he comes back inside his eyes do the sweep before his boots clear the mat. He's watching the trees harder.
I'm not snooping. I tell myself that on the way from the stool to the bookshelf. I'm existing in a space that contains objects, and the objects have stories, and I've always been good at noticing things.
The bookshelves take up most of the wall between the fireplace and the window.
Rough-cut pine, hand-built. His books tell me things.
A worn copy of Marcus Aurelius sits beside a field guide to Rocky Mountain wildflowers, which sits beside a paperback thriller with the spine cracked in six places.
There's a book on woodworking with pencil notes in the margins.
A collected poems of Mary Oliver with a dried aspen leaf pressed between the pages of a poem called "The Summer Day.
" I read it standing on one foot because my ankle is complaining.
The leaf is yellow and papery, the veins still visible. Someone put it there because the poem and the leaf belonged together. The fact that Ryker Stone, US Marshal, reads Mary Oliver and presses leaves into her poems rearranges something in the picture I've been building of him.
I put the book back exactly where I found it. I'm careful about that. Tyler used to go through my things and move objects just enough that I'd know someone had been there. I will not do that to Ryker's shelves.
The lower shelves hold small collections. Smooth river stones in shades of gray and green and a red so dark it's almost black. Feathers. A jay feather, blue and banded. A hawk feather, brown and curved. What I think is an owl feather, soft even lying still. Each one placed carefully.
He collects things. Just like how I collect mugs. I picture him on a trail, pausing to pick up a stone because the color was right, slipping it into his pocket. The image feels private enough that I almost stop looking.
Behind the feathers, leaned against the back of the shelf, there's a photograph.
It's small, in a plain wooden frame. A woman, early twenties, dark hair pulled back, caught mid-laugh with one hand raised like she's waving or trying to block the shot.
She's standing on a porch, sunlight behind her.
She's beautiful in the way that laughing women in photographs are beautiful. Just alive.
I stare at it longer than I should. My stomach tightens. Not jealousy. Something more complicated. A woman. Laughing. On a porch. Placed there with the same care he gives to everything he keeps.
Who is she? Girlfriend, ex, sister, friend. The photo doesn't say. I put it back. My fingers are trembling and I'm not sure whether it's the ankle or the fact that I care enough about the answer to feel anything at all.
A week ago I was eating berries in a snow hollow and wondering whether dying would feel like falling asleep. Now I'm standing in a man's cabin having feelings about a photograph. I squeeze my eyes shut, and breathe the way Ryker taught me. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
When I open my eyes I move to the desk.
The locked drawer pulls at me. I don't try it. Whatever is in there, he locked it for a reason. But the desk surface is open, and on it, beside the field journal, there's a letter.
Handwritten on cream-colored stationery. Neat, slanted, feminine handwriting. I don't read the body. That's a line I won't cross. But the closing is visible:
I'm proud of you, even when you make it hard to say so. Come home before the snow gets bad. I'll make the cobbler. Love, Mom.
His mother. The cobbler. The chamomile tea she sent two Christmases ago. I look at the letter and see a mother who loves her son from a distance, with patience, through food and letters and seasonal packages of terrible tea.
Something opens in me. Quieter than the broth or the panic attack.
A door I didn't know was closed. My mother used to write me notes on the backs of grocery receipts, slipped into my lunchbox or tucked into my coat pocket.
You're braver than you think. I found one in my winter coat two months after she died and held it until the paper went soft.
I don't have the note anymore. It's in the apartment above the diner, if the apartment is still there.
The back door opens. Cold air. Boot stamps. The familiar sequence of Ryker returning from the perimeter. I step away from the desk and turn toward the kitchen, and my ankle chooses this exact moment to quit.
Not a stumble. A full sideways buckle. The joint rolls inward with a bright flash of pain and my weight lurches toward the floor. I grab for the edge of the desk and miss. I grab for the back of the chair and it skids away. I'm going down.
He catches me.
I don't see him move. One second he's in the doorway pulling off a glove, the next his arm is around my waist and his other hand is gripping my elbow and my fall has been converted into a controlled stop.
Just the sudden absence of falling. Just the solid wall of him, closer than he's been since he carried me through the snow on the first day.
His arm is around my waist. My hands are flat against his chest. I can feel his heartbeat through his shirt, steady and unhurried.
His other hand is still holding my elbow, fingers wrapped around the joint with careful pressure.
Enough to steady but not enough to grip.
The warmth of his palm through the flannel is so specific that I can feel the shape of each finger.
I look up. He looks down. The distance between our faces is measured in inches and we are both aware of every single one of them.
His eyes are dark. This close I can see a small scar through his left eyebrow. The individual hairs of his beard where they lighten at the edges of his jaw. The way his pupils have dilated in a response that has nothing to do with the firelight.
I should step back. My rational mind knows this.
Professional boundaries. Trauma responses.
The fact that I've known this man for a week and the last man I trusted took my life apart.
My rational mind is correct and completely irrelevant because my body has its own opinions and right now its opinion is that the warmth radiating from his chest into my palms is the best thing I've felt since the elk broth.
He doesn't move either. His arm stays where it is. His eyes stay on mine, and in them I see the same war I'm fighting. The badge. The duty. The word compromised. He wants to pull me closer. I can feel it in the tension of his arm, the controlled stillness of his body.
One breath. Two. Three.
"Ankle?" he says. The word comes out low and rough.
"It's fine," I say. Which is a lie. The ankle is screaming. But the scream is distant compared to the reality of his hand on my waist.
He nods. Slowly. And then he does the hardest thing I've ever watched a person do.
He loosens his arm. He slides his hand from my elbow to my forearm to my wrist, the contact diminishing by degrees instead of disappearing all at once.
He guides me to the chair. Makes sure I'm seated and stable.
Then he steps back and the air between us cools.
"I'll wrap it again," he says. Already moving to the med kit. Already rebuilding the distance.
"Ryker."
He stops.
"The photograph on the shelf. The woman."
A pause so brief it barely qualifies as silence. "My sister. Sarah. She lives in Boise with her husband and two kids. I see them at Christmas when the roads allow."
His sister. The relief that floods through me is so transparent that I press my lips together to keep it from reaching my face.
I don't think I succeed, because when he turns back with the elastic bandage in his hand, something in his expression has shifted.
Something that knows exactly why I asked and is choosing not to name it.
He kneels in front of the chair and unwraps my ankle with steady hands.
I sit there with my pulse hammering and my palms still warm from his chest and the Mary Oliver poem running through my head.
The one with the leaf pressed between its pages.
The one that ends with a question about what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life.
I don't have an answer yet. But the list of possibilities just got longer.