At myself, for staying up here instead of making sure the north ridge was properly blocked off.
But I wasn’t angry.
I was standing in my kitchen, listening to Brooklyn tell someone named Hartley that she was fine—that a guy from the mountain had found her, that her ankle was sprained but she could still wiggle her toes—and something about the sound of another person’s voice in my house was doing things to me I hadn’t felt in months.
“She wants to know if you’re a serial killer,” Brooklyn called from the couch.
I leaned my shoulder against the doorframe. “Tell her I haven’t decided yet.”
She relayed it. I heard laughter through the receiver. Brooklyn’s mouth twitched—the first thing close to a smile I’d seen since I’d picked her up off that slope.
She was pretty. I’d noticed that on the ridge, which was inconvenient timing given the circumstances. Dark hair pulled loose from whatever she’d tried to tie it into, falling aroundher face in a way that looked accidental and probably wasn’t. Brown eyes. A mouth built for expressions that made people pay attention.
But it wasn’t her face that cracked something in me. It was the way she’d sat there on that unstable rock, ankle swelling, loose scree shifting beneath her, and looked up at me like she was irritated at the mountain for interrupting her plans.
No panic. No tears. Just a woman who’d gotten herself into trouble and was already calculating how to get out of it.
I knew that feeling. I’d built my whole life around it.
She hung up the phone and shifted on the couch, adjusting the ice pack. “Hartley’s going to tell Bobbi where I am. She wanted to come get me, but I told her the road up here isn’t exactly GPS-friendly.”
“It’s not. The gravel road off the main route isn’t marked. Most people don’t know it exists.”
“You like it that way.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah,” I said. “I like it that way.”
She looked around the cabin—the bookshelves, the woodstove, the single mug, the general absence of anything that suggested a life shared with another person. I watched her take inventory. I watched her draw conclusions. I waited for the question that always came next.
Why are you up here alone?
She didn’t ask it.
Instead, she said, “Is there any chance you have coffee? The fall knocked the granola bar out of me, and caffeine might keep me from feeling sorry for myself.”
I made coffee. Two mugs this time, which meant pulling the second one from the back of the cabinet where it had sat unused since Dash’s last visit. I brought them to the living room and handed her one, then sat in the chair across from the couchinstead of beside her, because the couch felt too close and the kitchen felt too far.
“You said you run an outfitting company,” she said, wrapping both hands around the mug. “Or youdid. Which is it?”
“I co-own it. Wildwood Ridge Outfitters. My partners, Evan and Dash, run the day-to-day.”
“And you do what? Live up here and rescue women who fall off ridges?”
“Apparently.”
She studied me over the rim of her coffee. I was used to people looking at me and seeing the beard, the hair, the cabin, and filling in the blanks with whatever story made sense to them. Hermit. Recluse. Guy who couldn’t handle the real world.
Brooklyn looked at me like she was waiting for the real version.
“Something happened,” she said. “On a trail. Someone got hurt.”
I set my mug down. “How did you know that?”
“You wrapped my ankle like you’d done it a hundred times, and then you looked at it like you were remembering the one time it wasn’t enough.” She held my gaze. “I’m not asking you to tell me. I’m just saying I noticed.”
Nobody had said that to me. Not Evan, who’d tried to talk me back with logistics and business plans. Not Dash, who’d tried with silence and beer. Nobody had simply looked at me and said, “I see what you’re carrying, and I’m not going to make you put it down.”