Now she chose it.
She chose me.
The thought lands so deep in my chest it almost hurts.
I get out and come around to her side, opening the truck door slow. She takes my hand without hesitation. That alone damn near drops me to my knees. Her fingers curl into mine, warm and sure, and I help her down onto the dirt.
The ridge is quiet. No one waiting. No one watching. Only the wind moving through the trees and the smell of pine and smoke clinging to the evening air.
Good.
She needs this to be ours before it belongs to anybody else.
Briar steps onto the porch and stops. Her free hand lifts to the rough railing. Then the doorframe. Then the latch. She touches everything like she’s taking inventory of a life she left this morning and came back to changed.
I don’t rush her.
Inside, the cabin holds the last of the day’s warmth. Firewood stacked by the stove. Her blanket folded on the chair. My boots by the door. The bed unmade from where we left too fast this morning. It should look ordinary.
Instead it looks like ours.
Briar lets go of my hand and walks farther in. She touches the table first. Then the chair by the hearth. Then the edge of the bed, fingers dragging over the quilt slow enough to tell me she’s feeling it, not just seeing it.
Home.
I know that word lives in both of us now.
She turns at last and looks at me. No panic in her eyes. No question either. Just too much feeling for one body to hold.
“You alright, sweetheart?” I ask.
Her throat works. She nods once, but her mouth trembles.
That nod guts me worse than tears would.
She comes to me all at once after that, crossing the room on bare feet and pressing herself into my chest hard enough to knockmy breath loose. I catch her automatically, one arm around her back, the other hand cupping the back of her head.
She smells like outside air and my truck and the soap from this morning and traces that are becoming only her.
I lower my face into her hair and hold on.
She saw her mother. Her sister. The life she had before the dark.
And she still came back here.
Still came back to me.
My hand slides down her spine slow, steady. Her breathing starts to match mine. The cabin goes quiet around us.
This is the moment before everything changes.
Or maybe it already has.
And I know, with a certainty that settles straight into bone, that I cannot let the mountain bind us before I ask her myself.
Not after what she survived.
Not after the choice she made.
