She holds. I watch the tension in her fingers, the way the blood has left them entirely, and I don't pull or force. I wait. The snow falls between us in slow, scattered flakes.
Then, slowly, her hand opens.
The rock drops into the snow.
The sound it makes is small and clear and finished.
I look at her palm. The indentations are deep, the skin pressed white and pink in the shapes of the stone's edges. Near the base of her palm the skin has broken in two places, small and shallow, blood just beginning to surface in thin lines.
I bring her hand up and press my mouth against her palm. My lips against the broken skin, against the marks the stone left,against the part of her that chose to hold on to something that hurt because at least the hurt was hers. Her fingers curl slightly toward my face. I feel them against my jaw, against the stubble there.
I pull her back in and hold her. She lets me. No resistance this time. She doesn't make a sound. She doesn't say anything. But her forehead drops against my chest and her fists uncurl and her hands flatten against my jacket, palms open, and she lets me take her weight.
Whatever happened to her, it left her like this. That's all I know. That's enough to know.
Snow begins to fall in earnest. Not the scattered flakes from before but something committed, the sky making good on the white promise it's been holding all morning. The flakes catch in her hair and on the shoulders of her coat and I can feel them landing on the back of my neck, cold and precise.
I press my lips to the top of her head. Her hair is damp with snow.
"Walk with me?"
I feel her nod against my chest. A small movement. Not much. Enough.
We move together out of the clearing and into the trees, settling into a slow pace. Our footsteps sound clean in the new snow, a rhythm that's almost companionable. She still hasn't spoken and that's all right. I'm not asking her to.
The trail narrows and I move a low-hanging branch out of her path. She ducks under my arm and keeps walking. The snow sifts through the canopy above us, catching the grey light on the way down.
After a while, I say, "I was sixteen when my mother died."
She doesn't respond. But I feel her stride shorten slightly, her pace pulling back half a step.
"She was driving," I say. "It was raining. She lost control of the car." I leave it there. The facts are the facts.
Maya stops walking. She turns to me, and her face is different now. The blankness from the clearing is gone. She raises her hand and places her palm flat against my chest, just above my sternum, and I can feel the pressure of it through my coat and my shirt and my skin, all the way down to the bone.
I look down at her hand. And then up at her face. And I hold her hand there with mine.
"I was angry for a long time," I say. "At her, which doesn't make any sense. At Owen, because after she died he went somewhere inside himself and I couldn't get to him." I pause. "At Reid, because he showed up and he was in charge and he didn't ask me whether I wanted that."
Her hand presses harder against my chest. Not pushing. Grounding.
"I didn't know what to do with any of it," I say.
We start walking again. Side by side. The trail is wider here and the trees are old enough that their branches form a canopy twenty feet above us, filtering the snow into a fine, scattered fall.
"When everything feels like it's coming apart," I say, watching the trail ahead, "and you can't get hold of any of it. You start looking for the one thing you can make happen yourself." I don't look at her. "Something you can feel. Even if that means physical pain."
The snow comes down a little heavier. The wind has dropped and the silence between the trees is the specific Montana silence that has weight and texture.
"I started fighting," I say. "Picked up with a crowd in the city where that was the currency. Didn't matter who. Didn't matter what about." I step over a root crossing the path and wait for her to step over it too.
"Got close to an arrest one night. Police officer who showed up turned out to be an old buddy of Reid's." I find a half-buried log crossing the trail, trunk slick with ice and snow, and I stop and turn and put my hands on her waist and help her step over it. My hands fit against the shape of her under the coat, the narrowing above her hips, and she lets me lift her and set her down on the other side, and we keep walking. "That was when Reid said enough. That we needed to get out. Start fresh somewhere new. He brought us out here."
I look up through the canopy. The snow is coming through the branches in diagonal lines, catching what's left of the light.
"I didn't want to come," I say. "I hated the idea of it. Leaving the city felt like losing her a second time. Everything she'd built for us was there. Our apartment. Our neighborhood. The bodega where she bought coffee every morning. I thought if I left I'd lose the last piece of her I had."
The trees thin ahead and I can see the shape of the cabin through the pines. The lit windows are warm and yellow against the grey light. Smoke from the chimney.
