Page 13

"For who?"

"Both of us. You're building patience. I'm building actual skills instead of ones a personal chef used to handle for me." She sets the pan down and looks at me, something warmer than humor underneath the joke. "I like doing normal things. Bad cooking included. It's the first time in years anything's felt like mine instead of something managed for me by other people."

I understand that more than she probably realizes. My whole life has been mine in the sense that nobody manages it for me, but it's also been narrow, walled in by secrecy and duty and the particular loneliness of protecting something I can never fully share with anyone outside the pack. Watching her claim small pieces of an ordinary life, badly cooked dinners included, makes me want things I stopped letting myself want a long time ago.

That night, after the dishes are done and the fire's burning low, she falls asleep on the couch partway through a movie neither of us is really watching, head tipping slowly toward my shoulder until it finally rests there.

I don't move her. I sit there instead, her weight warm against my side, and let myself imagine, just for tonight, what it might look like to have this permanently. Mornings with bad coffee and worse cooking. Evenings by the fire. A life built around someone instead of around distance.

It scares me more than anything I've faced on this mountain in years.

But sitting here with her asleep against my shoulder, I find I'm not entirely sure I want to be afraid of it anymore.

11

ZOEY

I've stopped pretending I don't want to know everything about him. Three weeks into living in the same cabin, sharing meals and mornings and the particular silence of two people who've started trusting each other with the quiet, I've learned the shape of what he won't talk about far better than I've learned the substance of it.

Tonight, dishes done and the fire settling into its usual evening glow, I decide to actually ask instead of circling the subject the way I usually do.

"Tell me about your parents, you've mentioned they're gone. You've never told me how."

He goes still in the particular way he does when a question lands somewhere sensitive, the same stillness I noticed the very first time I tried to push past his careful walls. For a moment I think he's going to deflect again, the way he has every other time this has come up.

Instead, he sets his mug down and looks at the fire instead of at me.

"I was eighteen," he says finally. "Old enough to understand what happened, young enough that it broke something in me I never really fixed. Outsiders found where we lived. People who shouldn't have known, who stumbled onto something they had no business finding." His jaw works, tight and controlled. "My parents made sure I got out. They didn't."

"I'm so sorry, Kellan."

"It was a long time ago."

"That doesn't mean it stopped hurting." I move from the couch to sit beside him on the bench, close enough that our shoulders touch, and don't push for more than he's ready to give. "You don't have to tell me the rest if you're not ready."

"There's more to it. Things I still can't explain, not yet. I will, though. Eventually. I just need you to trust that I'm not keeping it from you to hurt you."

"I already trust that." I mean it completely, the certainty of it surprising me even as I say it. "I've trusted you since the night you found me at the overlook. Probably before that, if I'm honest."

He's quiet for a while after that, staring into the fire with an expression I've come to recognize as him working through something too large to say all at once.

"After they died," he says eventually, "I convinced myself the safest thing I could do was stop letting anyone matter that much again. If nobody gets that close, nobody can be taken from me. I built my whole life around that idea. Made it simple. Made it safe."

"And now?"

"Now I've got a woman living in my cabin who burns dinner four nights out of five and somehow makes the whole place feel less empty than it's felt in seventeen years. Now the whole plan feels like it's falling apart, and I'm not sure I mind as much as I should."

Something in my chest goes warm and unsteady at that, the kind of feeling I haven't let myself trust since long before the attack ever happened. "I know what that's like," I say quietly. "Convincing yourself distance is safer."

"Fame do that to you?"

"Fame, and everyone who wanted something from me because of it." I pull my knees up, wrapping my arms around them the way I do when I'm about to say something I don't usually say out loud. "By the time I was twenty-two, I couldn't tell anymore who actually liked me and who liked what I could do for them. Boyfriends who turned out to want the exposure. Friends who disappeared the second I stopped being useful to their own careers. Eventually I just stopped letting anyone close enough to find out which one they were."

"That sounds lonely."

"It was. Is, I guess, or was until I ended up on this mountain." I look at him, letting him see exactly how honest I'm being. "You're the first person in years I haven't had to wonder about. I know you don't want anything from me except for me to be safe. That's rarer than you probably realize."

He reaches over slowly, giving me every chance to pull away if I want to, and brushes his knuckles gently along my jaw. "You deserve people who want you for exactly who you are. Not what you represent."