I don’t know how to explain what this is. This thing between us that isn’t dating, isn’t friends, isn’t anything with a name. Two people who are tired of being alone, choosing to be alone together instead. It shouldn’t work. I’m shy and he’s silent, and between the two of us, we can barely fill a conversation. But the silences don’t feel empty. They feel necessary. Full.
He’s whittling something. I noticed the knife and the block of pine last week, but didn’t ask. His hands move with the same unhurried precision I’ve watched him bring to firewood and coffee, and everything in between. Shavings curling onto the floor between his boots.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
His hands slow but don’t stop. “Yeah.”
“Why do you let me come up here?”
The knife pauses. He looks at me. Not guarded, for once. Just looking.
“I don’t know,” he says. And the honesty of it. The plain, undecorated admission that he doesn’t have an answer and won’t invent one. My throat tightens around something I can’t swallow.
“Why do you keep coming?” he asks.
I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them. The answer is somewhere in my ribs, and I’m not sure I can get it out without it costing me something.
“Because you don’t ask me to be anything,” I say.
He’s quiet.
“Everyone I’ve ever known has wanted a version of me,” I say. “Quieter. Louder. Easier. More fun. Less shy. My parents wanted a daughter who didn’t need them so they could leave without feeling guilty about it. My coworkers in LA wanted someone who’d pick up extra shifts without complaining. Everyone wants the version of me that makes their life easier, and I’ve spent so long giving them that version that I don’t—”
I stop. My throat is tight.
“I don’t always know which one is real.”
The cabin is silent. The fire crackles. Chief’s breathing is slow and steady.
“Your parents left,” Rhett says. Not a question.
“When I turned eighteen. They were never there before that, but they made it official.” I press my chin against my knees. “My older sister, Riley, raised me. We raised each other. She was twenty, and I was eighteen, and they just… stopped. Stopped calling. Stopped pretending. It was almost a relief, except it wasn’t, because even when you know someone’s going to leave, the leaving still breaks something.”
Rhett sets the knife down. The block of pine. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and looks at me with an expression I’venever seen on him before. Open. Present. The wall isn’t gone, but the door in it is.
“So you made yourself easy to keep,” he says.
The words hit me low in the ribs. Because that’s it. That’s the whole wound in one sentence, and he said it without pity, without the careful therapeutic distance I’ve heard from counselors who meant well but didn’t know what it felt like. Direct. Simple. True.
My eyes are burning. I press them shut.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “I did.”
“Bianca.”
I open my eyes. He’s looking at me, his face steady, his voice rough, and he says the next words the way he says things that matter. Slowly. One at a time.
“You don’t have to be small to be safe.”
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. The words sit in the air between us, and I can feel them rearranging something inside me, something deep and structural that has been arranged wrong for a very long time.
You don’t have to be small to be safe.
No one has ever said that to me. Not Riley, who loves me more than anyone, but has never named the thing she sees because she’s too close to it. Not the therapist I saw for seven sessions in LA before my insurance ran out. Not anyone.
This scarred, limping, silent man who barely speaks looks at me and sees the thing I’ve been hiding for twenty-nine years and names it, and he does it without raising his voice.
A tear slides down my cheek. I don’t wipe it.
