Page 17 of Ensnared By the Mountain Man

The shaking is because of the kid. Eight years old, running into a burning building, and I went in after him and got him out, and it worked. This time it worked.

But the only thing my body remembers is the time it didn’t.

Chaz Monroe. Forty yards from the safety zone. My call. My position. My fault.

I lean against the engine and close my eyes, and I can feel it all happening again. The wind shifting. The radio crackling. The sound of someone screaming my name through the smoke. I replay the whole thing, every second of it, and then I do what I always do. I replay it again with different choices.

What if I’d read the terrain differently? What if I’d pulled the crew back ten minutes earlier? What if I’d been standing where Chaz was standing and he’d been the one who walked away clean?

The crew captain finds me behind the engine and tells me good work and claps me on the shoulder. I nod. I say something that sounds right. I go through the rest of the shift on autopilot, packing up, checking gear, filling out paperwork. My hands are steady by the time we get back to the station, but the rest of me isn’t.

I keep thinking about Morgan.

Not the way I’ve been thinking about her for three days—the warm, soft way, the way that makes the cabin feel like a place someone actually lives. I’m thinking about her the other way. The way that asks what happens when she’s counting on me and I make the wrong call. The way that asks what happens when she’s forty yards from safety and I’m the one who put her there.

She gives everything. That’s who she is. She gave her childhood to her mother, she gives her days to the bakery and her evenings to anyone who asks and her nights to me now. And she does it without keeping anything back because that’s the only way Morgan knows how to love. All in. Everything she has. No reserves.

If I fail her, there’s no safety net. She doesn’t keep one. She’ll fall all the way, and it’ll be because she trusted me enough to let go of everything else.

I can’t be that person. I wasn’t built for it. I was built for reading terrain and making calls and being steady under pressure, and the one time it actually mattered, I got it wrong and a twenty-two-year-old kid spent six months in a burn unit.

I don’t go to the cabin after my shift. I go to the cabin and I don’t text Morgan and I don’t drive to Sugar Moon the next morning. I sit on the couch where she sat wrapped in my flannel that first night and stare at the kitchen counter where I held her three nights ago, and I can still smell the banana bread and the cocoa powder, and I tell myself that this is the right thing to do.

Letting her in was the mistake. Not because she’s wrong or I’m wrong or any of the easy reasons people use when they want to walk away from something that matters. Because I know how this ends. It ends with her depending on me the way Chaz depended on me, the way my crew depended on me—and me standing in the wreckage, wondering how I got it wrong again.

She’s better off without someone whose judgment burns people.

My phone buzzes.

Morgan: Missed you this morning. Everything okay?

I stare at it. My thumb hovers over the screen. I could type something. Anything. I could tell her about the fire and the kid and the way I shook behind the engine. I could drive to her apartment and stand in her doorway and let her look at me with those brown eyes and tell me I’m fine the way I always tell her she’s fine, and maybe I’d believe it the way she never believes it.

I set the phone facedown on the couch.

The cabin is quiet. The kind of quiet I used to need. The kind that used to feel like safety and now just feels like the sound of a man who is very good at being alone and very tired of it.

I don’t answer her text.

11

MORGAN

He doesn’t come to Sugar Moon on Friday.

I notice at 6:30 when the bell doesn’t chime. I notice again at 6:45, which is his old time—the time he used to come in before everything changed. I notice at 7:00 and 7:15, and by 7:30, Alicia has stopped looking at me because the expression on my face is probably hard to be around.

He didn’t answer my text last night. That’s fine. People don’t always answer texts. Maybe his phone died or maybe he fell asleep early or maybe he’s just having a bad day and needs space. I know about space. I’ve been giving Elias Riggs space since the first morning he walked into this bakery and I decided not to push.

But this doesn’t feel like space. This feels like a door closing.

I go through my shift the way I always do. Coffee, scones, customers, smiles. I ask about people’s kids and their dogs and their weekends, and I remember every detail because that’s what I do. I give. I show up. I pour myself into the people around me until there’s nothing left, and then I pour a little more because someone might need it.

By noon, I’ve texted him twice more. Once to ask if he’s okay and once to say I’m here if he wants to talk. Both delivered. Neither answered. I stare at my phone behind the counter and feel something cold settle into my chest.

“Go,” Alicia says.

I look up. She’s watching me with her arms crossed and her head tilted and an expression that says she’s been waiting to say this for the last three hours.