The north ridge.
The phrase doesn't announce itself. It arrives dressed as a hiking recommendation, friendly and vague, the kind of thing any local might say to a woman who's been walking the trails. But there's no trail on the north ridge. There's a mining road, and the mining road leads to exactly one place, and the only way Thayer would know I've been up there is if someone told him or he saw it himself.
He could mean nothing by it. He could mean everything. That's the whole trick of how he operates: the words carry just enough weight that catching them makes you wonder if you're the one who's reading too much in.
"I'm still learning the trails," I say, giving him nothing.
"If you ever want company, I know every path on that ridge." He lifts his coffee in a half-toast. "The offer stands."
His free hand lands on my arm. The touch is brief, warm, the exact weight and duration of a friendly gesture between neighbors. His fingers rest against my jacket for a count of two, maybe three, and the contact is perfectly calibrated.
It's wrong.
I can't point to why, which is the whole point of how he does it. The hand doesn't linger. The pressure doesn't increase. The warmth doesn't have anything underneath it that a witness could name. But my body knows the difference between a man who touches you because he's warm and a man who touches you to prove he can.
Callum's hands are possessive. They announce what they want and take it with the directness of a man who has never needed permission to be dangerous. His hands on my body last night were ownership, not friendliness, and the honesty of that, the refusal to pretend the wanting was anything softer than what it was, is the reason I let him stay.
Thayer's hand on my arm is the opposite. It's a hand that wants to be remembered as kind.
"I appreciate that," I say, and I step out of range.
He lets me go with the easy smile still in place. "Take care of yourself, Greer."
The words follow me down the sidewalk. The same words he used on Callum at the memorial. The same words Ward used on me. The Aldrich phrase, passed between family members like a coin with two faces, one of them sharp.
I walk the rest of the block to the gas station feeling his gaze on my back. He's still standing on the sidewalk when I glance over my shoulder, the coffee cup in his hand, the phoneforgotten, watching me go with the patient focus of a man who has all the time in the world.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Not Thayer.
Where are you.
Callum. No question mark. The sentence structure of a man who doesn't ask, he locates. The morning after he came apart against my throat and I told him to unbuild the worst thing he ever built, and his first communication is two words that read like a GPS ping.
The possessiveness of it should irritate me. It does irritate me. It also sends a pulse of heat low through my belly that I'm going to blame on the cold weather and never examine again.
Town. Errands.
Alone?
I ran into your cousin on the sidewalk. He told me to take care of myself.
The dots appear and hold for a long time. I can feel the temperature of his silence through the screen, the specific cold of a man whose jaw just locked.
Stay away from him.
Four words, no explanation, no context. This isn't the fixer. The fixer would contextualize, manage the disclosure, wrap the warning in strategy. This is the man underneath, the one who pinned me to a wall last night, issuing a command from the same raw place his body operates. The professional polish is gone, and what's left is protective and possessive and scared in a way that makes my chest tight, because Callum Aldrich doesn't scare, andwhatever he knows about Thayer put that crack in his voice even through text.
I pocket the phone without answering. He can sit with that silence the way I sat with his.
Aggie's station sits at the end of Main where the town stops pretending and becomes a road again. Flat roof, faded signage, fluorescent light that makes everything look like a crime scene photograph. I push through the door and the bell rings overhead.
Aggie is behind the counter with a paperback open on the register. Silver hair pulled back, the unhurried authority of a woman who's been watching this town from behind a gas station counter long enough to know where all the furniture is.
"Morning," I say, setting a basket on the counter. Bread, peanut butter, apples, granola bars. The diet of a woman who won't give the grocer her shopping list.
Aggie marks her page and sets the paperback down. The cover shows a woman in a red dress running from a castle. The genre is appropriate for Wicked Falls.
"You look like you've been up awhile," she says.
