Page 29 of Challenged By the Mountain Man

I look at her then and I see it in her eyes. The fear. The way she's still there, three weeks later, staring down the barrel of a gun that isn't there anymore.

"I didn't," I say honestly. "You don't get over it. You just learn to live with it."

Her face crumples slightly, like that wasn't the answer she wanted. "That's it? That's all I get?"

"That's all there is, Hannah. The fear doesn't go away. You just get better at carrying it."

Chapter 7 - Hannah

I wanted him to tell me there's a trick to it. A timeline. A method. Six weeks and you'll stop jumping at loud noises. Three months and you'll stop seeing the gun every time you close your eyes. A year and you'll be fine.

But he's not telling me that. He's telling me this is just... it. This is what I get now. Fear I have to carry around like luggage I can't put down.

"That's bleak," I say, trying to keep my voice light and failing completely.

Griffin shrugs, still crouched by the fire, his hands wrapped around his coffee mug. "It's honest."

"I hate that you're right."

"Yeah. I figured."

We sit in silence for a moment, just the crackle of the fire and the sound of our breathing. The cabin is warming up now, heat radiating out from the wood stove in waves. I pull the quilts tighter around myself anyway, not because I'm cold but because I need something to hold onto.

"I don't know how to deal with this," I say finally, and my voice sounds small even to my own ears. "I don't know how to be the person I was before. I don't know if I even can be that person anymore."

Griffin is quiet for a long moment, staring into the fire. Then he sets his mug down and turns to look at me. His ice-blue eyes are serious, steady in a way that makes me feel like he's actually seeing me instead of just looking at me.

"You need to get out of it," he says.

I blink. "What?"

"You need to get out of your head. Stop replaying it. Stop waiting for it to happen again." He leans forward, elbows on his knees. "You need to recognize that the person you were before the gun…She's still there. She didn't disappear. She's just buried under all the fear, the what-ifs and the constant vigilance."

"I don't know how to do that."

"I know how."

Something in the way he says it makes my chest tighten. Not with fear, but with something else. Hope, maybe. The possibility that he's right, that there's a way through this that doesn't involve just white-knuckling my way through every day for the rest of my life.

"How?" I ask.

He stands, moving to the window to look out at the morning. The sun is fully up now, painting the trees in shades of gold and green. "You need to trust me."

"That's it? That's your grand plan? Trust you?"

He turns back to me, "If you handled that axe yesterday, you can deal with everything."

I think about yesterday: the weight of the axe in my hands, the way he stood behind me and guided my swing, the satisfaction of splitting that first log clean through. I think about how for those few minutes, I wasn't thinking about the robbery, the gun or anything except the wood and the blade.

"That was different," I say.

"How?"

"I don't know. It just was."

"It wasn't." He crosses his arms, leaning against the counter. "You were present. You were focused on something that required your full attention. You weren't in your head cataloging threats or calculating costs. You were just... there."

He's right. I hate that he's right, but he is.