Page 157 of These Tears

If ever a man was built from contradictions, it’s Elias Crane.

It’s hard to reconcile the man who kidnapped me – who dragged me into a snowstorm and handled me like something to be picked apart – with this quiet, composed figure basking in the sun, who had remembered to bring me my camera and now lets me run around like a child who doesn’t know what to do with her joy. The same man who rattled me yesterday – and left me unable to separate that unease and confusion from everything my body did with it.

‘Gathering?’ I ask, latching onto anything but this thread of thought. ‘What gathering?’

Elias shifts slightly on the seat, the leather creaking beneath him. ‘Anders’ niece had a baby girl last week. The family are going over. Bringing food, cooking, helping with whatever needs doing. Marét’s mum died in childbirth, so she has no one to rely on but us.’

The skin between my brows crumples, and he catches on.

‘Marét’s father helped me build the cabin.’ His gaze stays on mine. ‘He showed up when showing up mattered, so now I show up, too.’

‘To cook?’ I raise a brow.

‘For whatever they need.’

There’s something so painfully ordinary about it that my thoughts tumble and twist. He remembers debts. Goes where old neighbours ask him to go. He cooks. Carries things.

My camera is still hanging from my hand.

Without thinking, I raise it. Elias follows the movement and his eyes settle on me through the winter light, but he doesn’t pose. Doesn’t ask questions.

For once, I don’t photograph the world or the darkness.

What’s the point? He’s the only one my lens really wants.

The shutter clicks.

My pulse begins a steady climb to my ears as I lower the camera before I start asking questions I don’t want to ask myself.

27

‘Elias,’ I begin, my voice drowned in the wind as it carries his name over the cliff.

The light makes love to him without shame as it slips over his cheeks and settles in his eyes. I almost envy it. And I wonder whether that’s why the dangerous urge always returns – to lean closer and stop caring what would happen if the lines between us blurred completely.

My body tilts towards him, and I catch myself in the next breath. Straighten. Blame the sunlight again.

But the sun has nothing to do with it.

Last night presses in immediately. It would be easier if I could file it under one thing: threat. Survival. Something tangible that keeps him on one side and me on the other.

However, my thoughts keep returning to his fractures and the terrible moment when I felt my monster’s wound reopening.

It doesn’t frighten me that he did what he did, or how he did it. It’s that I am still trying to stop that wound from bleeding.

If I ask him anything directly, he’ll give me nothing. Silence is his shield, and I’ve already broken myself against it enough times to know better.

So I drag my attention away from that and seize the first safer thought I can find. ‘Why did you apply for the programme?’ I keep my voice light and my distance sufficient.

His thick, black brows lift just a little. He looks past me towards the widening mouth of the fjord, then leans over the snowmobile, forearms braced against the sleek bodywork as though memory has added weight to his shoulders.

‘Bex thought it’d be good for me – having company in there. I’m known to… withdraw into myself.’

I sort through old names in my mind. ‘Rebecca? The programme coordinator?’

‘Yes.’ He nods once, too stiffly to make it casual. ‘Before she was that, she used to be a child psychologist. Then… changed course.’

His thumb drags once over the seam of his glove – hard enough to rasp.