CHAPTER 11
EVAN
“What—what are you talking about?” Amy says.
She pushes some of her hair—which is now loose, curled, not looking anything like the polished, pin-straight hair she showed up with—out of her face.
“I’m talking about the break on that tree trunk,” I say, working to keep myself from getting angry with her. Obviously she has nothing to do with that tree being in the road. It wouldn’t make much sense for her to come up here if she did, would it?
Maybe they sent out someone who wasn’t in on the setup to gather “evidence.”
“Did you take pictures of that tree last night?” I ask, realizing for the first time that she might not have just been using her phone for light. That it wasn’t some random reason she walked down the road. When she doesn’t answer me right away, I take a step closer, trying to contain my rage.
As complicated as my feelings are toward her right now, I’m aware of my position, of the power imbalance in this room. She’s trapped here by the weather, forced to stay with me in the cabin.I talked her into it. The last thing I’m going to do is let my anger get the best of me, to make her feel in any way that she’s not safe being here with me.
Today was an anomaly for me. It felt easy to talk to her, and I liked being around her more than I’ve liked being around anyone since I got out of the Corps.
But that doesn’t mean it’s the same for her. She gives me the impression that she’d be good at talking toanyone. Maybe she just wanted to play nice with me, given the fact that she has been forced to stay in my cabin. Or maybe this entire thing has been an elaborate plan to win me over—send a beautiful woman to sleep over so I let my guard down.
My gut tells me that’s not the case. Or, at least, that Amy isn’t in on it. I saw her face when she opened that file, the way the blood drained, how her expression flattened.
Gramps taught me to trust that instinct. And it’s telling me that she’s a good person, not someone who would try to slip someone’s land right out from under them.
I watched her face light up when we got that fish earlier, saw her determination to be good at something. Saw the way she threw herself into the task. She strikes me as too genuine a person to be part of this.
Then again, I’ve only known her for a day. Maybe I’m being too confident.
My head feels mixed-up in it all, and I swallow, deciding I’m done thinking.
“You don’t want to show me the pictures?” I ask, stepping toward the door, grabbing Blue’s leash. “Then come on.”
I slam out the front door and glance to my right, seeing the sun sinking fast through the trees on the far side of the property, where the land drops down in a steep decline toward the lake. We don’t have much time if we’re going to be out here, looking at this stuff.
At first, I think she’s not going to follow me. That she’s going to hold her position at the table.
Then the front door opens, and she appears in that old coat of mine, looking impossibly cute, swamped in the fabric even though it belonged to me when I was a teenager.
Seeing her struggling through the snow, I grab the snow shovel from its spot on the porch and start to make a path for us along the side of the road. Amy says nothing.
Neither of us says anything until we make it to the spot where the tree has “fallen” over the road—just around the bend from my cabin, out of view from the front door.
“I take the utility vehicle out every morning,” I say, turning to her. “Not to mention the fact that if this tree fell while I was here, I would have heard it. It’s on the main road. Not even that far from my place.”
“What are you saying?”
I point to the stump, the only thing left of the tree after I came out here this morning, cutting up the wood, loading it up in the UTV, and driving it back to the shed to air it out for firewood.
“I’m saying there was not a thing wrong with this tree. Nothing to make it fall. No storms, so no lightning, and it’s not rotted, either. The wood is green. I’ll have to dry it up before I can use it for firewood.”
“So… someone cut it down?”
The idea of someone loitering around up here makes me irrationally angry. A couple trucks go by pretty regularly—other ice fishers, guys out hunting, the occasional family lost on their way to another town. Sometimes they stop and ask me for help. Many of them I recognize. I try now to rack my brain, think back to the cars I might have passed on the road into town the other day, if someone might have come right before I left.
“And they put it in the road on purpose,” I add, feeling my jaw get tight. “Waited for me to leave, go to town—which I do once a week—and came out to cut it down. Then you show up the next nighttocheck it out.When I came to get you out from under it last night, I thought there was something weird about the whole thing, but I had other things to think about.”
Amy’s cheeks are pink, and I open my mouth, wondering if I should clarify that I haven’t been thinking abouther, but rather about the logistics of having another person in the cabin with me.
Even though Ihavebeen thinking about her. Specifically when I heard the guest shower turn on and had to roll over in my bed, heat rushing to my skin at the thought of that gorgeous woman taking her clothes off in my cabin.
