Back in the mining era, she'd said, Hollow Peak had been a pass-through town. Men between lives. Men who needed to disappear for a while before they could figure out who they were becoming. The mountains kept their secrets and the town kept its mouth shut and eventually those men either moved on or they didn't. The ones who stayed became part of the place the same way everyone else had—by deciding it was worth staying for.
The overlook was where they'd gone, those men. That was the other part of the legend. There was something about standing above the valley and seeing the whole of it laid out below you—the town, the river, the mountains on every side—that made a person understand what they were deciding.
The locals called it the confession point. Confess your love at sunset and the mountains will bless it. It was the kind of thing that got stitched onto throw pillows in tourist shops and laughed about by people who'd lived here long enough to be comfortable with it.
I hadn't laughed about it in a while.
I'd been thinking about Hale Nichols and the legend since Thursday. The way he'd stood in that canyon and told me the truth about his life with the same straightforwardness he used for everything—no performance, no careful management of what he gave away. A man who'd operated for twelve years on the principle that information was leverage. He’d opened up to me anyway. I'd turned that over for two days and kept arriving at the same place.
He wasn't hiding. That was the thing. Men who hid looked over their shoulder. He looked directly at whatever was in front of him and dealt with it.
I went up to the overlook after my shift on Saturday, in the last hour before sunset, because I needed to think, and high ground always helped me think. I took the switchback trail at a pace that kept my breathing honest and came out on the rocky overhang with the whole valley opening below me—Main Street catching the late light, the river a silver thread through the trees, the peaks going amber on every side.
Hale was already there.
He was standing at the edge of the overlook with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking out at the valley. When he heard me on the trail, he turned. He didn't look surprised. Like he'd known I'd come, or like nothing surprised him anymore.
"Rowan told you about this place," I said.
"First week. He said if you want to understand the town, come up here."
"He's right."
I came to stand beside him and looked out at the valley below. The light was doing the thing it did up here in the last half hour before dark—turning everything gold and a little unreal, the way places looked when you were seeing them truly for the first time. Or possibly the last.
"How many times have you been up here?" I asked.
"Four."
I looked at him. "Four times, and Rowan only mentioned it once?"
"I came back on my own." He looked out at the valley. "It's a good place to think."
"That's what I came for."
"I know." He said it simply. Not presumptuous—just accurate, the way he was accurate about most things. "You've been thinking since Thursday."
"You noticed."
"You went quiet in a specific way. Different from your regular quiet." He glanced at me. "You have about three different kinds."
I filed that away. "What are the three kinds?"
"Thinking quiet. Listening quiet." He paused. "The kind where you've already decided something but you're waiting to say it."
The valley glowed below us and I looked at it instead of him for a moment, gathering what I wanted to say. The rusted mining equipment sat in its permanent scatter behind us, the remnants of men who'd come here for something and stayed longer than they'd planned.
"Do you know the local legend?" I asked. "About this place?"
"The confession point." He almost smiled. "Mae mentioned it."
"Mae mentions everything." I looked out at the river below, the dark line of it winding through the trees. "The other part. About the men who passed through."
He was quiet, listening.
"Hollow Peak has always been a place where men landed when they were between lives," I said. "Men who needed somewhere to disappear while they figured out who they were becoming. The mountains kept the secret. The town kept its mouth shut." I paused. "Some of them moved on. Some of them stayed."
"And the ones who stayed?"
