Page 10 of Ensnared By the Mountain Man

The silence between us changes. It gets heavier, more careful.

“One of my guys got caught. Chaz Monroe. Twenty-two years old. He was maybe forty yards from the safety zone when it rolled over him.” I set the rock down. “He lived. Burns on thirty percent of his body, six months in a burn unit, and he lived. But he’s never going back on a line, and every time I think about him, I think about how I’m the one who told him to stand there.”

Morgan doesn’t say anything.

She doesn’t say that wasn’t your fault or you couldn’t have known or any of the things people say when they want to make someone feel better without actually sitting in the dark with them. She just stays. Right there on the rock next to me, her hands in her lap, her eyes on the valley, breathing the same air.

The silence stretches out, and I wait for it to feel unbearable the way it always does when I think about Chaz. The way it felt in Bend when I couldn’t sleep and in California when I started driving north one morning and didn’t stop.

But sitting here next to Morgan, the silence doesn’t feel like something I need to escape. It feels like a place I’m allowed to set this down for a minute without anyone trying to pick it up and hand it back to me with a bow on it.

“Is that why you came to Wildwood?” she asks after a while.

“Yeah.”

“Is that why you don’t let anyone close?”

The question is so direct and so quiet that it cuts right through me. Anyone else, and I’d shut it down. Change the subject, stand up, walk back to the truck. That’s the protocol. That’s what distance looks like when you’ve been practicing it for four years.

But she asked me like she already knew the answer and was just giving me the chance to say it out loud. And something about this woman, this rock, this light makes me tired of keeping it behind my teeth.

“Yeah,” I say. “That too.”

She nods. Her hand is resting on the rock between us. Her fingers are close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her skin, and I think about all the mornings I’ve watched those hands pour my coffee and bag my muffin and brush against mine for a half-second that I held onto for the rest of the day.

I put my hand over hers. Her fingers are smaller than mine, warm from the sun, and when I close my hand around them, she doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t make a big deal of it. She just turns her palm up so our fingers lace together and lets out a breath that sounds like she’s been holding it for a long time.

We sit there. The sun drops lower and the valley fills with shadow and neither of us moves. I can feel her pulse through her fingertips, steady and calm, and I match my breathing to it without realizing I’m doing it.

“We should head down,” I say eventually, because the light is going and the temperature is starting to turn. But I don’t let go of her hand, and she doesn’t let go of mine, and we walk back to the truck like that, connected, quiet, her steps careful on the loose ground and my pace matched to hers.

I open her door. She climbs in. I go around to my side and sit there with the engine off, looking at the trail we just walked down.

I should take her back to town. To her car, to her home, to the life that doesn’t include me sitting on a rock telling her about the worst thing I’ve ever done. That would be the smart thing. The safe thing. The thing that keeps the distance intact and the walls standing and the system running the way it’s supposed to.

“Do you want to come back to the cabin?” I ask. “I can make coffee. Or something.”

The or something hangs in the air, and I feel like an idiot for saying it, but she smiles that smile that’s just for me.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’d like that.”

I start the engine.

7

MORGAN

The cabin looks different in the afternoon light.

The last time I was here, it was dark and I was shivering and my ankle was throbbing, and everything about the evening had a dreamlike quality to it, like I couldn’t be sure any of it was actually happening. Now the sun is coming through the windows at a low angle and the woodstove is ticking with heat, and I’m standing in Elias Riggs’s kitchen looking at his cabinets like I have any business being here.

“Make yourself at home,” he says, and the way he says it tells me he’s never said those words to anyone in this cabin before.

I slip off my jacket and drape it over the arm of the couch. The cabin is warm from the woodstove, and without the jacket I’m just in my T-shirt, which somehow makes the whole thing feel more intimate. Like I’m peeling back a layer I didn’t realize I was hiding behind.

He stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the main room, arms crossed, watching me the way he watches everything. Carefully. Like he’s cataloging details he’ll think about later when he’s alone.

I open the first cabinet.