"Rourke—"
"I'm not done," he interrupts, but there’s no heat in it. "Whatever you're carrying—hiding—I don't need to know what it is. That's your business. But I need you to hear what I'm about to say." He holds my gaze, and his eyes are steady and patient. "Your silence is already hurting people. So what exactly are you protecting?"
The words are a punch to the gut.
He's right, of course. I’d come to the same conclusion just yesterday. Every justification I've been clutching for weeks—loyalty to Connor, protecting the camp, keeping the secret between us—crumbled like a rotted log.
There's nothing left between me and the truth except the parts I've never let anyone see…the identity, the shame, the story I've never said out loud because it makes it real in a way that a court record doesn't.
"You're right," I say.
Rourke nods slowly. "Then do something about it, mate. Before there's nothing left to fix."
And with that he pushes off the wall and walks away.
I stand at the splitting station for a long time after he's gone. The evening light is now amber through the trees, and somewhere across the camp, Ewan's tuning his fiddle for Heritage Night, and the smell of the fire pit is starting to drift through the air.
My uncle used to say that the hardest part of felling a tree isn't the cutting. It's choosing the direction it falls. Once you make the notch, gravity does the rest.
You just have to commit to the cut.
I find Kaylee at the registration cabin. She's alone—everyone else has migrated toward the fire pit—and she's shutting down her computer for the night, bag over her shoulder, keys in her hand. When she sees me in the doorway, her face goes blank.
"I'm heading out, Dean. Whatever it is, it can wait until?—"
"It can't." I step inside and close the door behind me. What I'm about to say can't have an audience. "Please. Five minutes. And then if you want me to leave, I'll leave."
She stares at me. I can see her calculating whether to stay, whether to bolt, whether she has the energy for another round of me saying nothing useful.
The exhaustion in her eyes nearly breaks me.
"Five minutes," she says. She drops her bag on the desk, but doesn't sit. Then she crosses her arms, as if it’s the only protection she has left.
I don't know where to begin, so I begin at the beginning.
"My mom left when I was seven." The words come out rough, as if they've been stored in a place that doesn't get accessed often. "Just took off one morning and never came back. My dad was…he drank. A lot. He was there, but he wasn't, if that makes sense. He was more interested in the bottom of a bottle than in raising a kid."
Her throat bobs as she listens.
"My uncle took me in when my dad’s drinking got out of control. Uncle Joe was a logger—old school. Lived in a cabin outside Spokane with no TV and a wood-stove and about forty acres of timber he knew by heart." I swallow. "He taught me everything. How to read a tree. How to fall timber safely. How to sharpen a blade, maintain a saw, and respect the land while you're working it." My voice wavers, and I let it. "He was the only person in my life who ever made me feel like I was worth something. Those years with him—eight through nineteen—they were the only stable thing I had."
Kaylee's arms loosen slightly.
"He died when I was nineteen. He had a heart attack on a remote job site. By the time anyone found him, he'd been gone for hours." I look at the floor. "I went off the rails after that pretty bad. Fighting. Drinking. Doing every stupid thing a nineteen-year-old with no family and no direction can do."
I force myself to look up. This is the part I've never narrated. The part where the court record becomes a story told in my own voice, and I have to watch her face while I tell it.
"When I was twenty-one, I was outside a bar in Missoula. There was a man in the parking lot. He had a woman against the wall and she was crying and trying to get away from him, andnobody was doing anything." I feel the old anger flare, distant but still hot. "I beat him up. Bad enough that when the cops showed up, I was charged with assault and arrested. I couldn't afford a lawyer who'd make the context matter, so I went to prison."
Her hand has come up to her mouth, stroking her jaw. I can't read her expression past it.
"I did eighteen months. And when I came out, I had a felony record and a certainty that I'd never be anything except what that piece of paper said I was."
It’s silent in the cabin, except for the distant murmur of Heritage Night beginning without us.
"I spent fifteen years with seasonal crews making up fake names and leaving before anyone got close enough to find out about my past. Every time I thought about staying—putting down roots, telling someone the truth—I'd picture their face when they learned what I am. And I couldn't take it."
I drag both hands down my face, and they're trembling.