You'll make it.Trust me.
Trust me.From the man who told me yesterday he doesn't know how to stand next to someone without saving them.
I load Scout into the car and drive.
The trailhead at the old ranger station is two miles north of town, a gravel pullout at the base of a trail that cuts through pine forest toward the waterfall that Nash Carter once told me is the most beautiful spot in Grizzly Ridge.I've never been.Stephen never took me.It occurs to me now, pulling into the lot beside his truck, that he's been avoiding this trail because of where it leads.
Water.
He's standing at the trailhead marker.Dark jeans, boots, a gray thermal pushed up to his forearms.His hair is uncombed and his jaw is tight, and he's got something in his hand.A pack.His rescue pack, the orange one I've seen hanging in the supply shed.The one with the rope and the harness and the emergency equipment that he carries on every deployment.
Scout jumps out and trots to Duke, who's waiting at Stephen's heel.The two dogs greet each other with a brief nose touch and settle.
I stop six feet from him.The same distance I maintained the first day we met.
"What's this?"I ask.
"A grand gesture."His voice is rough.Wrecked.Like he's been awake all night too."It's going to be a bad one because I don't know how to do them, and the only model I've got is Drew Briggs, who built an entire youth center, and Logan Creed, who literally married Erica the night he met her.So the bar is unreasonable and I'm going to fall short, but I'm here and I'm trying."
My breath catches.He shifts the pack on his shoulder and looks at me with those sea-green eyes that are lighter this morning, almost blue, the color of shallow water in sunlight.
"Walk with me," he says.
We walk.
The trail climbs through dense pine, the morning light filtering in shafts through the canopy.Stephen walks ahead, setting the pace.Not fast, not slow.Deliberate.Like every step is a decision he's making consciously.Scout and Duke range ahead, noses working the damp earth.
We don't talk.The silence isn't hostile.It's the silence of a man gathering the words he needs, and I've spent my career waiting for frightened creatures to find their voice.I can wait for this one.
The trail opens after a quarter mile, and I hear it before I see it.
Water.
Not a gentle trickle.A full cascade pouring down a granite face into a pool fifteen feet across, ringed with moss-covered boulders and fed by snowmelt from above.The sound fills the clearing.Rushing, constant, alive.
Stephen stops at the edge of the pool.
His body goes rigid.I watch it happen in real time.The locked shoulders, the clenched jaw, the way his hands ball into fists at his sides.His chest expands with a breath that shudders going in.
"I haven't been here," he says without turning around."Four years in Grizzly Ridge and I've never walked this trail because I knew what was at the end of it."
"Stephen."
"Let me finish."He turns.Faces me with the waterfall behind him, and the mist from the cascade catches the light and halos him in silver."I stayed up all night trying to figure out what to say to you.I wrote things down and crossed them out and started over, and none of it was right because the right words for what you are to me don't exist in any language I speak."
My chest aches.Deep and expanding.
"So I decided to stop talking and start showing."He shrugs the pack off his shoulder and sets it on the ground.Then he sits on the boulder nearest the pool and begins unlacing his boots."You told me yesterday that you don't need a rescue swimmer.You need a partner.And a partner doesn't stand on the shore."
He pulls off his boots.His socks.He stands barefoot on the cold granite and looks at the water.
"Stephen, you don't have to do this."
"Yeah, I do."He meets my eyes."Because this is the thing.This is the wall.I can't promise you a future while I'm still running from water.I can't ask you to build a life with me on a mountain where I can't even walk past a waterfall without hearing people drown."He steps to the edge of the pool.His toes curl over the rock."So I'm going in.And I need you to talk me through it."
Tears blur my vision.I blink them back because I need to see him.Every second of this.
"Like you'd talk a dog through a threshold exercise," he says, and the ghost of a smile crosses his face."Bring me below threshold.Keep me there.Help me build the association."
