My land. My quiet. Unchanged for six years.
Except the loft was empty and clean. The vitamins were behind the aspirin. The decaf was in the pot. And tomorrow the ginger tea would be on the shelf beside her peppermint, and she’d look at me and I’d look back and neither of us would say the thing that was filling up every room of this cabin.
She’d chosen me. Out of a catalogue, out of everyone. And then she’d come to find me. And every morning she walked up my steps, the truth got a little closer to the surface.
I went inside. Washed the dishes. Turned off the light.
The loft floor was swept and waiting.
So was I.
Chapter Five
FLORA
THE PENSTEMON — THOSEtall blue stalks the bees hit first every spring — was two weeks ahead of schedule, which meant either I was a genius or the mountain didn’t care about my timeline. Both seemed likely.
I knelt in the east bed with dirt packed under my nails and a rolling wave of nausea I was managing through sheer spite. Canvas pants, same tee I’d washed in Atlas’s machine yesterday, work boots that had more Montana in them than Oregon at this point. Ten days into a three-day suitcase. The plantings were filling in. Shooting star clustered along the creek bank in drifts of pale pink. Blanketflower had opened its first orange faces toward the morning sun. Lupine was shoving through the volcanic soil in the middle band, those spires of electric purple that drew bumblebees from fifty yards out. I could trace the full design from here: a staggered arc that would carry Atlas’s hives from April through first frost, each species handing off to the next, no dead weeks. My best work. For a client who didn’t exist.
My palm drifted to my stomach. I kept doing this, pressing low and flat, a reflex I’d picked up days ago and couldn’t shake. Nothing showed yet. My waistband was tighter, but Iwas blaming the sourdough because the alternative required a conversation I’d been failing to have for ten days straight.
The nausea crested. I sat back on my heels and breathed through my nose. Yesterday Atlas had been rendering beeswax in the extraction shed and I’d walked in and the hot-wax-and-propolis smell had hit me so hard I’d spun around, knocked over a stack of empty jars, and stumbled back into the sunlight with my fist over my mouth. He’d followed me out. I’d told him it was a head rush. He’d handed me a glass of water and said nothing, and the silence landed heavier than questions would have.
The morning helped. Spring in the Sapphires had its own medicine: pine resin on the updraft, damp soil baking in the early heat, the hum of sixty thousand bees starting their commute across the meadow. I dug my knuckles into the loam and studied what I could control. Gaillardia aristata, settling in nicely. Monarda fistulosa, tall and sturdy, already pulling scouts from the nearest hive cluster.
I heard his boots on the gravel before I saw him. He came around the east hives carrying a plate and a glass of water with ice in it. The ice meant he’d walked back to the cabin to get it. He crossed to where I was kneeling and set everything on the flat stone beside me.
Turkey and cheese on his sourdough. Thick-cut. An apple sliced into careful wedges.
“You skipped lunch,” he said.
“I rescheduled lunch. There’s a difference.”
“Not from where I’m standing.”
He sat down next to me. Not across from me, not at a polite distance. Here. His knee inches from mine, his weight easy, the kind of proximity that had stopped being accidental about six days ago. Sleeves pushed to his elbows. A smear of propolis across one wrist, amber in the light.
I picked up the sandwich. We sat.
The bees worked the lupine in their low hum. The creek ran behind us, high with snowmelt. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything.
My chest tightened so hard I had to set it down.
I was a talker. I filled silences as other people filled prescriptions: automatically, compulsively, because the alternative felt dangerous. Around Atlas I talked when I was happy, talked when I was nervous, talked when I was two sentences away from blurting out the single piece of information that would detonate everything between us.
Except lately, sitting beside him, I kept going quiet. And the quiet felt good. It felt like belonging, like I’d stopped visiting this mountain and started living in its rhythms. The belonging scared me more than the lie. Belonging meant the lie had turned load-bearing. Pull it out now and the whole structure came down.
He reached over and stole a corner off my plate.
“That was mine.”
“You weren’t eating it fast enough.”
“There’s no speed minimum for sandwiches, Atlas.”
“There is when you skipped breakfast too.”
I hadn’t told him that. I started to deflect and stopped. He was looking at the meadow. Offering the space.
