Afterwards, he pulls me close and I listen to his heartbeat slow.
"I had a thought," he says to the ceiling.
"Mm."
"The canyon site. Three miles from my cabin. The elevation would support radio equipment—clear sight lines, good signal range." A beat. "I've been calculating it. Since before I knew I was calculating it."
I smile in the dark. "A research station.”
“A place for our new life,” he corrects and my heart squeezes with emotion.
Finnegan
Six Months Later…
It’sbeenhalfayear. I know the exact number of days, but I don't count them the way I used to count things—forward into void, marking time against nothing. Now they stack up behind me like work well done. A record of something worth keeping.
It's a spring morning and I'm running my second trap line when I hear her voice on the radio back at the cabin, Tom's check-in, her end of the frequency. The words are muffled by distance but the sound reaches me through the trees and I find myself moving a little faster on the way back.
That's new. Wanting to get home.
I have three rabbits and a fox by the time I reach the door. Kate's sitting at her radio equipment in the corner that used to be empty shelving, her hair still loose from sleep, pen moving across a notebook. She holds up one finger without looking at me mouthingone moment, and I go to the kitchen and start breakfast and count the steps automatically.
Twelve. Same as always. Same cabin. Just not the same.
Her books are on my shelves. Her handwriting is on the whiteboard I built her. There's a second mug on the hook by the window, and every morning for six months I've taken it down without thinking about it.
She finishes her transmission, sets down the handset, turns around and smiles at me. That particular smile that’s easy, morning-soft, entirely for me.
"Tom says Clearwater held again last night," she says. "Third week running."
"Expected outcome given the barrier placement."
"Don't ruin my joy with competence." But she's still smiling. She crosses to where I'm cracking eggs and tucks herself under my arm like she belongs there, which she does, and watches me work. "Good line this morning?"
"Three rabbits. Fox."
"Finn." She tilts her head up. "The fox." The same fox that’s been after our chickens. A happy coincidence, in my book. But she has a soft spot for the devious critters. Something I’ve yet to understand why.
"It was already caught. I didn't go looking for it."
She makes a sound that means she doesn't entirely believe me. She's right not to. I may have adjusted that particular trap placement three weeks ago knowing the territorial range. I don't mention this.
We eat at the table with our notebooks open between us the way we always do now. Her columns and my columns side by side, patterns emerging from combined data the way they don't from either alone. It should feel intrusive. It feels like the most natural thing I have ever done.
"I want to ask you something," Kate says.
I set down my fork. Conversations that start this way are never about data.
She's watching me with that careful look that means she's trying to read my face and also trying to make sure I can read hers. "Are you happy?"
The question moves through me slowly, finding all the places it needs to check.
Three years, four months, twelve days of counting myself down to nothing. Routines as a substitute for living. The cabin as a perimeter against loss. And then her, half-frozen and furious and carrying six months of dead men's work in her pack, crashing into my system and somehowimprovingit.
"Yes," I say.
She exhales. Like she wasn't sure.
