Then I retreat.
I murmur something—“I’ll be in my room, give you two space”—and step back down the hall before I do something stupid like sit with them or ask if they’re really okay. My pulse hasn’t slowed. My palms still feel warm from holding that damn juice box. And the echo of Ava’s voice, trembling and terrified, is lodged somewhere under my ribs.
Inside my room, I lean both hands against the dresser and bow my head.
I don’t care. Ican’tcare.
And yet.
The image of Violet trembling in that kitchen won’t leave me. Neither will the sound of Ava’s relief when the numbers climbed. Or the way she looked at me like I’d done something that mattered.
I shut my eyes hard, jaw clenched.
A day ago they were strangers.
And somehow, this morning, losing them—either of them—already feels like more than I should ever risk.
Chapter Ten
Ava
The cabin is quiet in the late morning light—too quiet, honestly.
Violet is curled up on the guest bed with her Chromebook and a blanket tucked around her legs, doing online assignments with the kind of focus she only ever musters when she’s still recovering. She has color back in her cheeks, thank God, and she keeps insisting she feels “normal-ish,” which is Violet code fornot perfect, but don’t freak out about it.
I kiss the top of her head and force myself not to hover like a hummingbird with maternal anxiety issues.
“I’ll be in the living room if you need anything.”
She glances up, gives me that patient teenage smile—half affection, halfseriously, Mom?“I’m good. Go breathe or something.”
So I do. I step out into the hallway and let out a long exhale.
The cabin smells like coffee and pine and faint woodsmoke. It’s warm, cozy in a way that shouldn’t surprise me but somehow does. When I imagined Jax’s home—this man I dragged out of a snowbank with my bare hands—I pictured something like a cave: cold, unfriendly, all sharp corners and sharper silence.
But this… This feels lived in. Not by a family, but by someone who once remembered how.
On the far wall near the kitchen is a narrow door. I haven’t seen inside it yet. Everything else he showed us last night—the guest room, the bathroom, the kitchen—was spotless, organized to an almost unnerving degree.
The door stands slightly ajar now.
I shouldn’t look. It’s none of my business. I’ve already overstepped with this man by… well, saving him, for one.
But curiosity is a stubborn flame, and it’s been burning since the moment I saw him last night in the ranger station: eyes like winter stormwater, grief carved deep in the lines around his mouth, an anger that wasn’t really aimed outward so much as inward.
I nudge the door open with one finger.
Inside is a workshop.
Small, but meticulously arranged—tools lined up with surgical precision, screws sorted by size into glass jars, notebooks stacked on a shelf in an order only he would understand. There’s a radio, old and dented, sitting silent on a table littered with wires and circuitry.
And in the center of the workbench is a spiral notebook flipped open.
The writing inside stops me cold.
Equations. Schematics. Detailed notes on avalanche activity and pressure sensors. Pages of calculations I barely understand, but know enough to recognize asnot ordinary.
This isn’t the hobby of a mountain hermit tinkering with broken radios. This is engineering. Real engineering. Advanced.
