Page 10 of Challenged By the Mountain Man

When I finally stand, my knees protest. I've been holding myself too tight for too long, and everything aches in ways that have nothing to do with the drive up here or the cleaning I did yesterday.

I look at the generator sitting on the ground like some kind of mechanical peace offering I didn't ask for and definitely don't understand.

*Everything costs something.*

I meant that when I said it. I learned it young, watching my mother work herself into exhaustion for rent money that was never quite enough, watching my father promise things he'd never deliver before he finally stopped showing up at all.

I learned it again in my twenties, clawing my way through community college on loans I'm still paying off, building a life where every single piece had a price tag I could see coming. And I learned it three weeks ago when a man walked into the bank with a gun and reminded me that sometimes the cost is your sense of safety, and you don't get a receipt.

So yeah. Everything costs something.

Even this, a generator I didn't ask for, delivered by a man who looked at me like I was an interruption he didn't want but also like he couldn't quite bring himself to leave me freezing in the dark. I still don't know what Griffin wants, but I'm going to find out.

The generator starts on the third try, exactly the way he showed me. I stand there listening to it hum, loud and deeply out of place in the quiet of the mountain.

Light. I'm going to have light. I go inside and flip the switch by the door, and the single bulb overhead flickers once, then glows steady and warm. It's the first thing that's gone right since I got here.

I sit down on the edge of the faded couch, the one I evicted a family of mice yesterday and let myself breathe. Just breathe. The cabin is still a mess. The window is still cracked. The whole place still smells faintly of dust, wild things and wood smoke from the stove I'm barely keeping alive. But there's light now. And heat. And for the first time in three weeks, I don't feel like the world is too big and too loud and too full of things I can't control.

I pull out my phone and scroll to my messages. There's one from my manager: *Hope you're settling in. Take your time. We've got things covered here.*

One from my best friend, Jenna: *You alive? Send proof of life or I'm calling the forest rangers.*

I type back: *Alive. Cabin is rustic. Neighbor is complicated. Will explain later.*

She responds immediately: *NEIGHBOR??? Is he hot???*

I stare at the message for a long moment, trying to figure out how to answer that. Griffin is... a lot of things. Hot doesn't feel like the right word. Intimidating, yes. Massive, absolutely. Scarred in ways that make me wonder what the hell happened to him and also make me want to stop wondering because it's none of my business.

But hot? I think about the way he looked at me on his porch yesterday: ice-blue eyes that didn't blink, didn't soften, didn't give me an inch. I think about the way he stood there this afternoon, walking me through the generator like he was doing me a favor he didn't want to be doing but was going to finish anyway because that's apparently who he is. I think about the way his dog sat down at my feet and looked at me like I was the answer to a question he'd been asking for years.

*Complicated,* I type again. *Definitely complicated.*

Jenna sends back a string of eyeball emojis and a gif of someone saying *"I'm listening."* I don't reply.

Instead, I set my phone down, pull my jacket tighter around me, and step back outside. The sun is starting to sink lower now, the light turning golden and soft through the trees. The air smells like pine, the generator hums behind me, and I feel the weight of the day start to settle in my bones.

I walked half a mile up a mountain road to ask a stranger for help. I stood on his porch and demanded answers. I didn't run.

For someone who spent the last three weeks jumping at shadows and avoiding crowds and forcing her way through every grocery store trip, that feels like something. It feels like progress.

I spend the next hour going through the supplies I bought in Wildwood. Canned goods. Bread. Peanut butter. A case of water bottles even though the pump in the kitchen works fine. Batteries. A flashlight. Mouse traps, because I'm not going through another night wondering if something's skittering around in the walls.

I set the traps in the corners of the cabin, bait them with peanut butter, and try not to feel guilty. I'm not trying to hurt anything. I just want to sleep without worrying something's going to crawl across my face in the dark.

By the time I'm done, the sun is dipping lower, painting everything in shades of amber and gold. The temperature is dropping fast, and I can feel it creeping in through the cracked window. I should do something about that tomorrow. Tonight, I just want to eat something that isn't a granola bar, sit by the fire and not think about guns or banks or the way my hands shook for hours after the cops finally left.

I'm pulling a can of soup from the cabinet when I hear it.

*THUNK.*

Sharp. Loud. The unmistakable sound of metal hitting wood. I freeze, the can halfway to the counter. My heart does that thing it's been doing for three weeks: kicks into high gear before my brain can catch up, flooding my system with adrenaline I don't need.

*It's nothing,* I tell myself. *It's just…*

*THUNK.*

Again. Coming from up the road.