Nick’s attention kept moving: vehicle, Naomi, then back to me. He never stopped doing his job. Somehow, standing this close, that made the man harder to ignore. “This ridge makes people uncomfortable,” he said. “No signal. Narrow road. Too much sky. People think the view is the point.”
“It isn’t?”
“The point is what happens when they stop being reachable.”
My fingers tightened around the Leica. I lowered the camera. “That sounds dangerously close to a metaphor.”
“It’s terrain.”
“Of course it is.”
He reached past me, his hand closing gently over the lens to angle it a fraction to the left. The adjustment was small, almost nothing, and somehow worse than if he’d taken over. His knuckles brushed mine, brief and controlled, and every sensible thought in my head stepped directly off the overlook.
“Don’t chase the whole horizon,” he said. “Pick one point and hold it.”
I looked through the Leica again. This time, the frame caught the road where it tightened between two shoulders of rock before dropping toward the lower plain. A clean pinch point where movement had to choose a direction. “A bottleneck,” I said.
“Yes.”
The word sat between us, too precise to be innocent.
“One way through,” he said. “Everyone thinks they’ll have options until the land removes them.”
I kept the camera to my eye because lowering it felt dangerous. “And then?”
His voice dropped closer. “Then you find out whether they waste time resisting or move with what’s in front of them.”
The ridge stayed quiet around us, except for the dry scratch of grass and the occasional hard call from the Acacia grove. Behind us, Owen and Naomi remained exactly where Nick had placed them, safely bored and uselessly disconnected. Nick didn’t stop monitoring them. Not once. The attention he kept on me felt sharper for being rationed.
“You brought me here because the signal drops,” I said.
“No.”
“No?”
He turned slightly, enough that the line of his shoulder blocked the glare. “I brought everyone here because it’s part of the tour. I brought you to this side of the rail because you needed to see what happens when the noise stops.”
My throat tightened. I hated that he could do that, say something quiet and practical and still find the tender place. “I function perfectly well without noise.”
“You function perfectly well while managing it.”
“That’s not the same thing?”
“No.”
A single syllable. Flat. Certain. Obnoxious.
The Leica strap slipped against my wrist. I tightened my grip before it could fall.
“You can run a company from anywhere with signal,” he said.
“And without one?”
His face angled toward mine behind the dark lenses. “Then you have to decide who you are when no one is asking you for an answer.”
He stepped closer, leaving me room and taking up all of it anyway.
I should have stayed in the lodge bar with a very large gin and tonic. This is how perfectly respectable women lose the plot.
