The snow that came out of nowhere.
Her reflection.
Her walls.
My own walls slamming up in response.
Her voice through the tent fabric last night was fragile and honest in a way she probably hadn’t meant to let slip.
That’s the scariest part.
Everything had felt slightly unreal, as if the world tilted just enough to make normal reactions harder to find.
And it was like the mama bear returning with her cubs was an omen. Time to start over back at the lodge without all those feelings roaring up on a trail somewhere.
And Sienna…
I didn’t know how someone could be so soft and sharp at the same time, so bright and so guarded, so determined to show she didn’t need anyone while giving herself away in tiny cracks she never meant to show.
Yesterday, she’d looked at me like I was something dangerous without being sure if that danger was weather or fire.
I dragged a hand over my jaw, feeling the roughness of stubble. The heater hummed faintly in the corner, pushing warmth into the room, but it didn’t do much for the cold still sitting under my ribs.
I wasn’t supposed to feel this unsettled.
Not by a woman.
Not by anyone.
Not after the life I’d already lived.
I stood and paced a slow line between the bed and the kitchenette, boots still on, jacket half unzipped. My thoughts moved backward before I could stop them, straight to the part of my past I avoided unless something forced it to the surface.
My parents’ faces flickered up first.
Not as I’d last seen them, that memory was useless and cold and jagged along the edges, but as they’d looked before the accident.
My mom was kneeling in the dirt of her garden, her hair tied back with a bandana, waving me over to show me the first tomatoes of summer.
My dad chopping wood in the backyard, pausing every few minutes to yell at my brother for trying to sneak marshmallows before dinner.
I’d been in my twenties when we lost them. Old enough to understand the logistics of grief. Too young to understand the weight of it.
And my brother, four years younger, had looked at me with eyes that said,You’re the only person I have left now. Don’t screw it up.
So I didn’t.
I handled the funeral.
The estate.
The debts.
The paperwork.
The long nights when the house was too quiet except for his breathing down the hall.The mornings when he pretended he didn’t hear me cry in the shower.
For the next few years, I kept everything together the way I assumed a parent would, even if I had no idea what that meant. I took jobs that paid quickly, saved every cent, kept food in the fridge, kept him in school, kept the world spinning.
