Iwoke up in the loft.
Not the loft above the garage—the loft in Dash’s cabin, where the mattress sat on the floor and a wool blanket served as a curtain between the bedroom and the rest of the house.
We’d hiked back from the boulder as the sun dropped behind the ridge, and somewhere between the back door and the stairs, he’d pulled me against him and kissed me in a way that made the loft feel like the only logical destination.
That had been last night.
Now it was early—gray light filtering through the single window, the sound of birds starting up in the trees outside. Dash was asleep beside me, one arm slung across my waist, his breathing deep and even. He slept the way he did everything else—completely, without reservation, like it hadn’t occurred to him to hold anything back.
I lay still for a long time, watching the light shift on the ceiling, feeling the weight of his arm and the soreness in muscles I’d never used before, and the steady drum of my heartbeat, which hadn’t fully settled since yesterday afternoon.
Then I looked around.
The loft was Dash in miniature. A flannel shirt draped over a chair that also held a coil of climbing rope. A stack of trail maps on the floor beside the mattress, held down by a rock he’d apparently brought inside for that purpose. Boots—three pairs, all caked with dried mud—lined up near the top of the stairs in the only evidence of order in the entire space.
Beyond the loft, through the gap in the wool blanket, I could see the kitchen I’d reorganized yesterday morning. The mugs I’d sorted. The table I’d cleared. The countertop where a chainsaw air filter had lived until I’d moved it to the windowsill.
My throat tightened. What was I doing here? Not here in the loft—I knew how I’d gotten here, and I didn’t regret it. But here, in this cabin, in this town, in this man’s life.
I was an events coordinator from a mid-sized city four hours away. I owned a label maker. I had a color-coded filing system for my tax receipts. The most rugged thing in my apartment was a succulent, and even that was on a watering schedule.
Dash built footbridges with his hands and cleared trails with a chainsaw and knew the difference between a red oak and a white oak by looking at the bark. His life was this mountain—the mud, the timber, the predawn mornings, the physical labor, and the kind of bone-deep competence that came from years of doing hard things in hard places.
I reorganized kitchens. That was my skill. I walked into chaos and made it make sense, and then I left, because the event was over and my job was done and nobody needed me to stay for the part that came after.
I was the girl who planned the party.
I was never the one who got to stay for it.
I slid out from under his arm carefully, pulling on my jeans and his hoodie—which I’d apparently claimed permanently, though neither of us had discussed it. I crept down the loftstairs and into the kitchen, where my phone was charging on the counter.
Three texts from Brooklyn, sent late last night.
Paisley submitted her scavenger hunt entry. She’s weirdly confident about it. Also, she’s basically moved into Evan’s cabin.
I’m doing one of the harder trails tomorrow morning. There’s a high-point species on the checklist that only grows near the north ridge, and I need it if I’m going to have any shot at the prize money. If I don’t text you by noon, send a search party.
How’s the lumberjack situation?
I stared at that last text for a long time. Then I started making coffee, because that was what I did when I didn’t know what to feel. I made coffee. I cleaned things. I organized.
I did the next task on the list because the list was safe and the list made sense, and the list never asked me to be something I wasn’t sure I could be.
The coffeemaker gurgled. I wiped the counter. I checked that the mugs were still sorted.
“You’re doing the thing.”
I turned. Dash was at the bottom of the loft stairs in boxers and nothing else, his hair wrecked, sleep still in his eyes. He looked like a man who’d woken up and found that the best part of his morning had left the bed—and had come to get it back.
“What thing?” I said, even though I knew exactly what thing.
“The thing where you start cleaning instead of saying what’s going on.” He leaned against the wall at the base of the stairs, arms crossed. Not confrontational. Just there, steady and patient—like a tree that had decided not to move. “You did it the first day. Walked into my kitchen and started rearranging things because it was easier than being in a space you couldn’t control.”
“That’s not?—”
“Hartley.”
I set the mug down harder than I meant to. “I don’t belong here, Dash.”