"Don't leave this cabin," I say. "I need an hour."
"Where are you going?"
"Outside. To read the file again with what you just told me."
I move outside to put some distance between us. Give her space. Give her room to breathe. Then, I open the file on my phone. I start reading it from the top.
two
Hazel
Thecuffcomesoffmy wrist and the door closes behind him and my body just gives out.
Not all at once. My legs fold first. That's how I end up on my grandmother's floor, back against the table leg, hands flat on the cedar planks while the rest of me takes its time catching up to the fact that forty minutes ago I was certain I was about to die. My hands are shaking. My teeth are shaking. There's something inside my ribs shaking too, a small animal I didn't know was in there. I press my palms harder against the floor because cedar is solid and I need solid right now.
I sit there for a while. I don't think. I just breathe.
When thinking comes back it does what it always does under pressure — it starts building a table. I'm a forensic accountant. My brain, when frightened, doesn't spiral. It organizes. Clean rows, a logic to follow, and if I give it that, it'll hold the rest of the world still long enough for my heart rate to find its way back. I've been using that trick since I was twelve.
So. Calgary. The firm. Forty-two staff, one glass building off Fourth Avenue. A corner office with no window that I stopped being insulted by two years ago. A ficus on the filing cabinet because I once read that plants don't actually need natural light as much as the internet claims, and I needed to believe it.
Outside, a crow calls. Four seconds between calls. Regular. Ordinary. Nothing is coming up the road.
Five weeks ago I was reconciling an offshore account and found a rounding pattern that had no business being there. Transfers from a Belize shell sitting just under the automatic flagging thresholds, layered through a Liechtenstein intermediary into three limited partnerships sharing a registered agent. I built the map quietly, on my own time, over three weeks. I was going to finish it the week Dev died.
The taste of this morning's coffee is still in the back of my mouth. Metallic. Gone cold. I pull my arms tighter around my knees.
Dev. Twenty-nine. Too clever for the job he had. He kept a photo of his mother on his desk in a frame she'd made at a pottery class. I told him enough of it — not everything, just enough, because I trusted him and needed a second pair of eyes. He was going to look at the Liechtenstein file overnight. He was going to get back to me in the morning.
He didn't.
My apartment had been turned over when I got home from the gym. Not ransacked — nothing so obvious. Just rearranged in the specific way that's meant to be noticed, and I noticed. My decoy laptop was gone. Dev was found in his car in his building's parkade, ruled a suicide by the responding officer. I knew it wasn't, for one specific reason: Dev was frightened of carbon monoxide. Genuinely frightened, the kind where he once walked out of a restaurant because he thought the boiler smelled off. Aman afraid of a particular thing does not choose that particular thing as his way out.
Fourteen days. Four thousand dollars cash withdrawn before anyone could freeze anything. A bus. A hostel where I slept with my shoes on. A Subaru bought from a stranger on Kijiji who took the cash without asking why I wasn't signing the bill of sale. Revelstoke, Kamloops, a gas station bathroom where I dyed my hair with a ten-dollar kit and cried on the tile floor for twenty minutes — still, embarrassingly, the longest cry of my adult life. North through the interior on roads I'd driven twice before, until I remembered the turn-off to this place.
My grandmother's cabin. She's been gone four years. The family didn't want it — too remote, too rough, no Starbucks within an hour. She left it to me in a will I'd half-forgotten, because I'd put the paperwork in a drawer and never opened it again. I came here because it was the only place in the world that wasn't in my name but still felt a little like mine.
My table stops there. Then, uninvited, it adds one more line.
The man outside.
I should be running a threat assessment. Thinking about the truck in the yard, whether the keys are in it, what my options look like from here. Instead I'm sitting on this floor thinking about his hands, which tells me something about my current mental state that I'm not going to examine too closely.
Here's what I noticed, forensically: when the cuff came off, he held my wrist for a beat after. Just a second, thumb running along the inside, checking the skin. Checking whether he'd left a mark. A man delivering me to Voclain doesn't stop to check whether he's hurt me. That detail doesn't fit the file he was carrying, and I know exactly what to do with a detail that doesn't fit.
The other thing — the less forensic thing, the one that is simply true — is that he is extraordinarily good-looking in a way I wasnot remotely prepared for. I registered it on the path the way you register a car coming at you: total, instantaneous, no warning. He's tall in the way that reorganizes the space around him. Built the way men get built from years of actual outdoor work, not the curated kind but the kind where a body just becomes what the job requires. The beard is dark, silver at the jaw, and on a lesser face that might read as tired. On his, it reads as settled. His eyes are grey-green, the colour of the lake on a cloudy morning. He moved quiet for a man that size — the specific quiet of something large that learned early to be careful, because it had to.
There's also a pale scar running along his left forearm, wrist to mid-arm, and I want to know the story of it badly enough that it's almost annoying.
I start crying somewhere in the middle of all that. My face ends up in my knees, the flannel takes on the wet, and I can't stop for what feels like a long time — four minutes, roughly, though I'd stake nothing on my sense of time right now. When I finally stop it's not because I've mastered anything. It's because I hear his boots on the porch steps.
He said an hour. It's been an hour.
I get up. I make it to the table. Both hands around the empty water glass, cheeks dry because I had just enough time.
He comes in with a paper bag, sets it on the counter, unpacks it with the same methodical quiet he seems to bring to everything — tomato soup, sliced bread, a banana, a gas station coffee withSILVER RIDGE GAS & GOwritten on the lid in faded marker. He looks at me the way a careful person looks at something damaged. Not pity. Assessment. Someone already deciding what to do first.
In better light he is, if anything, more. Fine lines at the corners of his eyes from years of looking at distances. His mouth under the beard is — I look at the coffee instead.
