She looked at the cooler. Looked back at me. I could see the calculation happening—pride versus practicality, independence versus the thing she was only just now realizing she didn't know.
"I can handle it," she said.
But her voice had shifted. It was softer at the edges.
"I know you can." I meant it. Whatever she lacked in skills, she made up for in refusal to fold. That counted for more out here than most people understood. "But I'm staying anyway. I'll set up over there." I pointed to the far side of the clearing. "You won't even know I'm here."
She looked at the spot I'd indicated, then back at me. The late sun was catching her face through the canopy, light falling across the angle of her cheekbone, the damp skin at her temple, and the set of her mouth as she made her decision.
"Fine," she said. "But I'm making my own dinner."
"Wouldn't dream of stopping you."
She went to her cooler, and I pulled my bedroll from my pack and laid it out where I said I would. Far enough to give her space. Close enough that if anything came through this camp in the night, I'd hear it before she did.
I strung the bear hang while she ate—her cooler up on a branch using a rope and a system of knots she watched without asking me to explain. Then I sat against the tulip poplar at the edge of the clearing and watched the light change through the canopy, the gold going amber going copper as the sun dropped toward the ridgeline.
The heat was still heavy. It would be a warm night—the kind where the air never fully let go of the day and the dark just made the heaviness worse. The cicadas were already starting up, a low electric hum that would build as the light faded until it was the only sound in the world.
Flint would have done the same thing—stayed without making it a negotiation. The difference was that Flint would have looked like he was standing guard. I just looked like a man who wasn't in any hurry to leave.
Which was the truth. I wasn't in a hurry. I had nowhere else I wanted to be.
3
STACIA
The sandwich was terrible.
I'd made it that morning—turkey and Swiss on wheat—and it had spent the last nine hours in a cooler that had given up on being cold around hour four. The bread was soggy. The turkey had that iridescent sheen that meant I was either going to be fine or violently ill. The Swiss cheese had sweated through the plastic wrap and fused with the bread in a way that suggested they were now one organism.
I ate the whole thing because Duff was sitting fifteen feet away eating what appeared to be actual food—something from a vacuum-sealed pouch that he'd mixed with creek water—and I would rather have choked on bad deli meat than admit my dinner was a failure on top of everything else.
He didn't comment on my sandwich. He didn't comment on much. He ate, cleaned his mess kit, and leaned back against the tulip poplar with the unhurried ease of a man who'd spent a thousand nights exactly like this one.
The heat hadn't broken. It was dark now—fully dark, the kind that didn't exist in Charlotte, where there was always a streetlight or a parking lot or the blue glow of a phonescreen somewhere nearby—and the air was still warm and close, pressing against my skin like a damp cloth.
I'd changed into a tank top and shorts so thin they were barely more than underwear, and I was still too warm. Sweat collected in the bend of my elbows, the backs of my knees. The sleeping bag was rolled up inside the tent, useless.
But the woods at night. That was something I hadn't expected. Fireflies were everywhere—drifting up from the ground in slow pulses, lighting the tree line in scattered gold. The cicadas had built to a full wall of sound, layered with tree frogs and the distant rush of the creek Duff had found earlier. Above the canopy, stars showed through in patches, more than I'd ever seen, thick and dense enough that the sky looked textured.
"I can't stay in this tent," I said, because I'd tried. I'd lain inside it for fifteen minutes and it was an oven, the nylon trapping heat like a greenhouse. "It's too hot."
"Sleep outside," Duff said from across the clearing. "Ground's dry. Lay your bag flat and sleep on top of it."
"What about bugs?"
"They're mostly after the light. Stay away from the flashlight and they'll leave you alone."
I pulled my sleeping bag out of the tent and spread it flat in the clearing, about halfway between my tent and his spot under the tulip poplar. When I lay down on top of it, the air felt immediately better—moving, barely, a faint stir that carried the smell of warm honeysuckle and creek water. The sky opened up above me, huge and close.
"What about bears?" I asked.
"Food's hung. You're fine."
I could hear the almost-smile in his voice even in the dark.
The quiet stretched out between us—not silence, because the woods were anything but silent, but the quiet of two peoplewho had stopped talking without it feeling like something was missing. I lay on my back and watched the fireflies drift.
