“This is where you live,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.
“This is where I live.”
She nodded. Something in her face I couldn’t read.
Drew spent the last quarter mile walking next to me while Nell picked her way down in front of us, moving carefully on the descent, one hand on the rocks when the trail steepened.
“She’s good for you,” Drew said, quiet enough that she couldn’t hear.
“You’ve known her three hours.”
“The algorithm knew her in forty-five seconds.” He adjusted his pristine hiking boot on a rock. “The way you look at her, man. That’s not data I need to analyze.”
“I look at everyone.”
“No, you don’t.” He clapped my shoulder. “Thirty days. You can thank me later.”
I didn’t answer. Nell had stopped ahead to shake a pebble out of her shoe, hopping on one foot, swearing under her breath, and I watched her catch her balance against a cedar trunk and flip the shoe upside down with an expression of absolute personal betrayal, and something moved in my chest that felt a lot like trouble.
Drew left an hour later. Standing by his rental car, he shook my hand and pulled me close.
“Your algorithm matched me with a woman who brought a forty-seven-page manual to a mountain,” I said.
“Exactly.” He grinned. I’d made his point for him. “The algorithm doesn’t lie.”
I stood in the yard while he drove away, stayed there until the sound of his engine faded and the quiet came back.
That evening, Nell sat on the porch with her feet propped on the railing, a bag of frozen peas pressed against her heel. The light was going soft across the valley, doing that thing it didin late May where everything turned warm and slow and the shadows stretched long across the meadow below the tree line.
I brought her a mug of tea without thinking about it and set it on the wide arm of her chair, then grabbed a beer for myself.
“Thanks,” she said, surprised.
I shrugged and sat in the other chair. We didn’t talk. The river filled the silence, and somewhere in the trees a bird was repeating the same three notes over and over, patient and unbothered.
Her hair had given up. Whatever she’d built that morning had come apart on the trail, and it hung loose around her shoulders, damp at the temples, tangled where a branch had caught it. Her blouse had a green streak across the sleeve and her trousers were muddy at the hem and she was pressing the peas to her foot with both hands, and she looked nothing like the woman who’d stepped out of that white Prius yesterday.
I liked her better this way.
The thought landed before I could stop it. The gold light caught her face and she was just sitting there, watching the sun drop behind the ridge, completely still, and my whole body went quiet the way it did before a bad drop on a rapid — that half-second where you know the fall is coming and your hands stop gripping and your breath catches and there’s nothing to do but go.
I took a drink anyway.
Chapter Three
Nell
I WAS WEARING MY HUSBAND'Sshirt, and I was thinking about it more than a flannel shirt warranted.
Six days on Cliff Masterson's mountain and my cream blouse was finished, pine sap ground into the sleeve from a cedar branch on Drew's hike, the fabric stained beyond anything a dry cleaner would attempt. Cliff had opened his closet that evening without comment, pulled out a green flannel that smelled like woodsmoke and laundry soap, and held it out. I'd taken it because I was running out of tops that could survive contact with the outdoors.
That had been three days ago. I was still wearing it.
I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror — the flannel rolled to my elbows, collar open, hem hitting mid-thigh over my trousers — and stopped brushing my teeth. My hair was half down, the twist I usually maintained having surrendered to mountain humidity sometime around day three, and the overall effect was a woman I did not recognize and did not entirely object to.
This was concerning. I had a system for clothes. I had a system for everything. Borrowing a man's shirt and finding itcomfortable was not a system — it was a symptom, and if I thought about what it was a symptom of, I'd have to update the 47-page manual, and the manual did not have a section for developing feelings about flannel.
I rinsed my toothbrush and went to the main room.
