Okay. Cool.Super.
I dragged myself upright against the fallen trunk and assessed the damage. The ledge above was unreachable now.The hillside below plunged into dense forest. My daypack dangled from a branch six feet away like it was mocking me.
My phone.
I crawled toward the pack, dragging my right leg, and unzipped it with shaking hands. The screen was intact. One bar of signal. I opened my texts.
Hartley.
I hovered over the keyboard, suddenly very aware that I had, in fact, told her to send a search party.
I typed,Hey. So, funny story,then deleted it. Nothing about this was funny.
My ankle was swelling inside Paisley’s borrowed boot. I was off-trail. On a steep mountainside. With one bar of signal that flickered like it was actively reconsidering its loyalty.
I tried calling.
Failed.
Again.
Failed.
A text might sneak through. I typed,Off trail on north ridge. Fell. Ankle might be broken. Can’t climb back up. Send help.
The progress bar crept forward. Stalled. Crept.
I leaned my head back against the tree and closed my eyes. The forest was too quiet. No birds. No wind. Just my breathing and the faint rush of what might have been a creek far below.
This was the moment in the movie where something cinematic and terrible would happen. A storm rolling in. A bear.
What I got instead were footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate. Crunching through leaves above and to my right. Boots. Not tentative, not searching, but confident.
I opened my eyes. A man stood at the top of the slope about twenty feet above me.
He was big.
That was the first thing my brain registered. Not just tall. Broad. Solid in a way that made the trees behind him look decorative by comparison. A face carved in sharp planes. A beard that had long since stopped pretending to be intentional. Canvas jacket. Flannel. Boots that had clearly been resoled more than once.
He looked like the mountain had grown him itself.
His gaze found me. Moved from my face to my ankle to the dangling daypack. I watched him piece together the whole story without asking a single question.
Then he started down the slope. He moved like the terrain belonged to him. No sliding. No grabbing for support. Just controlled steps, boots landing on rocks that had nearly taken me out five minutes ago.
He crouched beside me. Up close, his eyes were gray-green. Lighter than the rest of him. Unexpectedly so.
“Can you move it?”
His voice was low. Rough. Like it didn’t get used much.
“I tried. It didn’t love that.”
He reached for my boot, and his hands—huge, calloused hands—were careful. He unlaced it slowly, easing the leather away from my swollen ankle. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep quiet.
He pressed along the bone, his movements deliberate and clinical.
“Not broken,” he said. “Bad sprain. You’re not walking out on it.”