I’d known who her father was before I said any of it. That wasn’t an oversight. I’d weighed it the way I weigh everything—quiet, careful, no rush to land anywhere. And I told her anyway. Because the alternative was giving her half of it, and I didn’t want to do that.
Somewhere between the trail and the canyon, I’d decided she deserved the truth more than I needed the cover. That was new. For years, I’d lived by a simple rule—information is leverage, and leverage keeps you alive. But out here, with her, that math didn’t work anymore.
We stopped for lunch on a gravel bar where the current split around a low island. Flat rocks, sun finally warming the canyon. She pulled out sandwiches and handed one to me without a word. No fuss. No explanation. Like she’d always been the kind of person who just…took care of people.
And maybe she had.
"Mae teach you that?" I asked.
"Teach me what?"
"Feeding people without making them feel like they're being fed."
She looked at the sandwich in her hand. "My mother, I think. Mae just reinforced it." She took a bite and looked at the water. "My father feeds people too, just differently. He shows up. Does the thing that needs doing without announcing it."
"Sounds like Mae," I said.
"Hollow Peak runs on that." She looked at me. "You're not bad at it yourself."
"At what?"
"Showing up and doing the thing." She said it simply. "You brought two staffs."
I didn't have anything to say to that, so I didn't say anything. She seemed to understand that. She ate her sandwich and watched a dipper work the far bank. I sat beside her and felt a calm I hadn't felt in months.
We fished until four and walked out in the long afternoon light, and she was quiet on the trail in the easy way she'd been quiet on the way in. At the trucks, she broke down her rod and stowed her gear, and I did the same. When she closed her tailgate, she leaned against it and looked at the ridge.
"Same time next week?" she said.
"I've got clients Tuesday and Wednesday."
"Thursday, then."
"Thursday," I said.
She pushed off the tailgate and fished her keys from her vest pocket and looked at me across the gap between our trucks. The light was going gold on the peaks behind her and she had a smudge of sunscreen on her jaw she hadn't noticed. She was looking at me the way she always looked at me—openly, without agenda—and I understood that I was done.
Not done in the way I'd been afraid of. Done with the version of myself that kept running the math and coming up with reasons to stay back.
"Mia," I said.
She waited.
"I'm glad Rowan needed a guide."
She stayed quiet for a second, but something shifted in her expression. Not surprise, just recognition. The look of someone who'd been thinking the same thing and was glad to hear it said.
"Me too," she said.
She got in her truck and drove down the mining road in a cloud of dust. I stood there a while longer with the canyon behind me and the peaks going pink in the late light, and I didn't think about moving on once.
5
MIA
The legend had been part of Hollow Peak longer than anyone currently living could verify, which was part of what made it stick.
Mae was the one who'd told me about it, years ago, the way she told me most things—sideways, while doing something else, like the information was incidental when it wasn't.
