That crooked grin again. “Smart.”
He studied me over the rim of his mug.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “Apartment’s yours, no strings attached. Kitchen, shower, whatever you need—back door’s always open. I’m out by seven most mornings doing trail work, so you’ll have the run of the place. One rule.”
“What’s your rule?”
“Stop moving my stuff.”
I looked at the counter I’d already cleared. The air filter on the windowsill. The mug I’d selected from his disorganized cabinet.
“No promises,” I said.
His eyes held mine, and something flickered there—like he was updating a file in his head, and the new information was more interesting than he’d expected.
“Yeah,” he said, almost to himself. “That’s what I figured.”
2
DASH
Something was different about my kitchen.
I stood in the doorway at six in the morning, shirtless, half-awake, scratching the back of my head—and stared. The countertop was visible. Not partially visible, not clear in one corner where I'd shoved things aside. Fully, entirely visible, like a countertop in a house where a normal person lived. The mail was in a neat stack. The granola bar wrappers were gone. The chainsaw air filter was nowhere in sight.
I walked in and opened the nearest cabinet. My mugs—all seven of them, none of which matched—were lined up by size, handles facing the same direction. I opened the junk drawer. The tape measure was in it, sitting where it technically belonged but had never actually been.
And Hartley was sitting at my kitchen table.
I didn’t even know I had a kitchen table. I mean, I knew it was there—I’d bought it at a yard sale two years ago. But it had been buried under so much gear and paperwork that it had functionally ceased to be a table and become a horizontal storage unit.
Now it was cleared, wiped down, and she was sitting at it with a printed itinerary, a trail map, and the scavenger hunt checklist spread in front of her, a pen tucked behind her ear and a mug of coffee at her elbow.
She’d made coffee. Fresh pot, filter changed, grounds in the trash instead of sitting in the basket until I remembered they existed.
“Morning,” she said without looking up. She was frowning at the trail map like it had personally offended her.
“You reorganized my kitchen.”
“I tidied. There’s a difference.”
“My mugs are sorted by size.”
“They fit better that way.”
She finally glanced up, and something in my chest shifted in a way I wasn’t prepared for at six in the morning. Her hair was pulled back. No makeup. She was wearing a hoodie that was too big for her—mine, I realized. She must have grabbed it off the hook by the back door. She looked soft and focused and completely out of place in my rough-hewn kitchen, and somehow she made the whole room look more intentional just by being in it.
“Coffee’s good,” I said, because I needed to say something that wasn’t “you’re wearing my hoodie and I want you to keep it forever.”
“It’s the same coffee you had yesterday. I just used the right ratio.” She turned back to her map. “Bobbi gave all the scavenger hunt participants a checklist. I’m not as serious about it as Paisley, but I figured since I’m here, I might as well try some of the easier trails. Do you know which ones are in decent shape right now?”
I pulled out the chair across from her and sat down. At my own kitchen table. A thing I hadn’t done since I bought it.
“Laurel Creek Loop is good—Evan ran a group tour on it yesterday. Fern Hollow’s fine up to the second creek crossing, but after that, the footbridge is sketchy. I’ve been meaning to rebuild it.”
She was writing this down. In a notebook. With neat handwriting and bullet points.
“What about the ridge trails?” she asked. “The checklist has some higher-point species up there—flame azalea, something called a pink lady’s slipper?”