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His eyes move over my hair and the ink on my forearm, slow and steady, and there’s no judgment in it at all.

“You chose yours,” he says.

“I did. That doesn’t mean I chose what people do with it.”

He’s quiet for a beat. “No,” he says. “It doesn’t.”

Then he nods once and walks off toward the trees, still dripping. Is that a win? It feels like a win. A very small, very soggy victory.

By the time I finish my first incident report, the sun is behind the ridge. Upstairs, the shower runs brown for a full minute.

In the mirror, there’s a small pink dent below my lip where a steel ring lives. This morning I decided looking responsible meant looking like less of me. Was I an idiot? Yes.

I take the ring out of my jewelry tin and slide it back in. I press my tongue to it from the inside, the way I have a thousand times.

There. That’s my face.

As I hang my towel over the chair, a light moves below my window. A work lamp shines down by the creek. Holt is out there in the dark, alone, pulling out the old bottom rail of the fence and fitting a new one so low a cat couldn’t squeeze under it. He holds a post steady with one hand and drives a nail with the other.

Officially, a repair like that needs a work order and budget approval, and our incident report is barely an hour old. I’d bet my last guitar pick he bought that lumber himself. He’s doing this on his own time, and nobody is watching.

Well, nobody except me. Is that creepy? I’m calling it professional interest.

When he’s done, he checks every rail twice with his hand, like a dad checking a car seat. So this is the man who wrote that memo? A man who’d rather fix a fence in the dark than take a thank-you in daylight?

He straightens and glances up at my window. I dart behind the curtain and almost trip over the chair. Smooth, Nicholls. Very smooth.

When I peek out again, he’s packing up his tools.

Prue left my schedule on the table. All twelve weeks are laid out in neat little boxes, and every single box says the same thing: FIELD PARTNER: H. ASHFORD.

So here’s my problem. The whole town is counting on this trail, and my colleague doesn’t want the trail, doesn’t want a partner, and won’t tell me what’s wrong with the north loop.

What is he guarding up there?

The lamp clicks off below, and his huge shape heads home into the trees.

Twelve weeks. I can survive anything for twelve weeks.

Even him.

CHAPTER 2

MINE AT FIRST SNIFF

HOLT

The station smells like muffins.

I stop on the porch, my hand on the door handle. Butter, brown sugar, and blueberry. My nose reads a room before I enter it, and this one says someone wants something.

For one stupid second, I wonder if it’s the new officer, buttering up the man who wrote a memo against her. She doesn’t need to. She’s already a complication, and she’s only been here a day.

It’s six-twelve, and my shift starts at six-thirty. I could walk the north boundary and return at nine, when whatever’s waiting inside is someone else’s problem.

Then the handle turns under my hand, pulled from the other side.

Wren Nicholls stands in the doorway, a mug in her fist. A steel ring threads through her lip today, and her hair is loose around her shoulders. Yesterday she looked as though she was trying to disappear into her uniform. This morning she looks more comfortable in her skin.