“If you ran me over by accident?”
“Come on. There’s one other human in a fifty-mile radius—”
“Ten-mile,maybe.”
“—and I manage to hit him with the only vehicle available? No witnesses? No good reason for me to be out here? That’s suspicious as fuck.”
I have no idea why we’re talking about this, but I lean against the truck window anyway.
“Andi,” I say. “Areyou here to murder me and make it look like a freak accident?”
“No,” she says. “I’m just saying that’s the conclusion people might come to if I run you over by accident because you won’t take two more steps back.”
“I’m starting to consider throwing myself under the wheels and framing you if we don’t get back to it soon,” I tell her.
“How would youframeme?”
I grab a shovel and break apart some snow behind a tire. I don’t really need to, but standing still when there’s work to be done makes me restless.
“You just told me how everyone would suspect you,” I point out. “You’ve got means, motive, opportunity—”
“Motive?” she says, and I freeze, because that was a fucked-up thing to say and I obviously shouldn’t have. I don’t mean that I actually think Andi’s going to do it. I mean that, if I were a detective looking into reasons she might kill me, people have gotten murdered for less.
I look up, still crouched on the ground and she’s still staring at me from the truck window, and the worst part is she doesn’t even look mad. She looksconcerned, and alarmed, and on her pretty face the expression is almost tender—
“Gideon,” Andi says, and I stand up.
“Right,” I say. “Start her up and try it again, and this time you’ve really gotta let off the clutch slow and step on the gas.”
Andi mutters something about this being the first time in ten years she’s driven a stick so she’s doing great, actually, as I grab the firewood we brought with us from the cabin, each log conveniently wedge-shaped.
* * *
It’s slow-going,dirty, and an unpleasant combination of cold and sweaty. It’s in the upper twenties, which is below freezing but not cold enough for the snow to have much traction, so the ground is turning into mud slush, my least favorite surface. Every time Andi gets the truck a few more inches back it’s my job to shove a wedge in front of the wheels so it doesn’t roll back, and half an hour in, at least she stops gasping in alarm every time I do it. There are rocks and branches and stumps underneath the snow that I can’t see, and despite my heavy boots I’ve stubbed every toe six times, I think.
“Almost there,” I tell her, and stand back. “One more good shove and we’re on flat ground again.” Thankfuck. The road—well, “road”— through here is flat and easy enough to navigate, but the spot where I slid off and gently bumped a tree has a distinct downward slope.
Andi just nods, checks that the truck is in gear—something she’s done every single time even though, to my knowledge, she’s never taken it out of gear—and hits it. Both the rear wheels find purchase on the flat part of the road, the truck steadily if slowly moving backward. For a moment I let myself feel relieved that we managed to get this out without making it worse, getting frostbite, or having to tell the Forest Service what happened, and—
The wheels must hit an ice patch or something because suddenly it’s sliding right toward me and Andi is shouting, the front bumper gleaming with light reflected off the snow.
“Brakes!” I shout, getting the fuck out of the way, only my foot snags on something and next thing I know I’m spitting out snow, swearing, and trying to shove myself back to standing so I don’t get run over.
The moment I try to move my left ankle, pain shoots through it all the way to my knee.
I gasp, eyes shut, freezing hands clenched in the dirty snow. Shit.Shit. In the periphery, a truck door slams.
“Gideon!” Andi shouts, and she sounds terrified again, the second time in two days I’ve freaked her out like this. “Shit, are you okay?”
“Fine,” I tell her, both hands still in the snow, my left leg at an angle I can only describe asincorrect. When I finally manage to look down at my foot, the toe of my boot is still under the root I tripped over. Great.
And now Andi’s here, her knees hitting the snow, her hands up and floating six inches from my right side, like I’m a dangerous but fluffy animal she wants to touch and can’t.
“What happened?” she asks, breathless.
“I tripped,” I say. I still haven’t moved, pain still spiking up my leg. There was a definitesnapwhen I went down, but I’m ninety percent sure it was a twig, not bone. “You’re supposed to steer into a skid.”
“Shut up,” she says, and now she does put her hands on me, one on my shoulder and one in the middle of my back. They’re warm even through my coat, somehow, and I close my eyes for a moment because despite everything, this feels good. “Is it your leg? Can you stand?”
