"You needed the sleep more than I did."
That was so unreasonable and so exactly right that I didn't know what to say. He'd let me sleep. He'd handled the thing I was dreading. He hadn't made it a production.
I sat up and found my tank top, pulling it on. "What's he like? Flint."
Duff laced his boots, each motion precise. "Intense. Watchful. Doesn't say much, but when he does, it matters." He pulled a knot tight. "He plans for things that haven't gone wrong yet. Which is why he asked me to check the trail—we had a washout last week and he wanted to know if it was passable before he sent anyone up."
"So you were up here on a job."
"I was up here as a favor. Flint doesn't ask for much. When he does, you show up." He looked at me. "I'm glad I showed up."
My chest expanded. Not pain. Fullness—the feeling of a space being occupied that had been empty so long, I'd forgotten it was there.
We broke down the campsite together. He showed me how to pack the tent properly—pole sleeves left to right, stakes in the mesh pocket, rain fly folded separate—and I did it myself while he lowered the bear hang and scattered the evidence of our camp. Methodical. Unhurried. Like two people who'd done this a hundred times instead of once.
By the time the sound of a truck engine growled up the logging road, the clearing looked like no one had been there. Duff shouldered his pack and mine without comment and started toward the road.
"Duff."
He stopped. Turned.
"Thank you," I said. "For staying."
He looked at me for a long moment—filing this away too. My face in the morning light, the words, the fact that I'd said them without hedging.
"I wasn't going anywhere," he said.
The truck appeared around the bend—a big blue Chevy with a toolbox bolted into the bed. The man who stepped out was exactly what Duff had described. Tall, dark-haired, built like someone whose job involved pulling people out of rivers. Hemoved with the same economy Duff did but sharper—coiled where Duff was steady, watchful where Duff was calm.
"Flint," Duff said.
Flint nodded. His eyes went to me, assessed, cataloged, moved on. No judgment. Just information.
"Belt's shot," Flint said, already moving toward my car. "Brought two sizes. Should take twenty minutes."
He popped the hood and went to work. Duff leaned against my car, arms crossed, watching—not Flint, me. I stood in the middle of the logging road, morning sun on my face, listening to the click of tools and the cicadas starting back up in the trees.
Twenty minutes later, the car started on the first try. The engine sounded cleaner than it had in months.
Flint wiped his hands on a rag, tossed it in his truck bed, and gave Duff a look I couldn't read—something between acknowledgment and amusement, as if he'd assessed the situation between us and was choosing not to comment.
"Appreciate it," Duff told him.
Flint's gaze flicked to me again. A nod. Then he climbed back into the truck, pulled a U-turn on the narrow road, and drove away without another word.
The road back to the main highway was right there—four miles of gravel and switchbacks and then pavement and then decisions. "I don't want to go back to Charlotte," I said again.
This time it wasn't a declaration. It was a fact. Settled.
Duff pushed off the car. Walked toward me. Stopped close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him layered over the heat already building in the morning air.
"Then don't," he said.
I reached into my shorts and pulled out the list. Unfolded it. I didn't cross anything off. I didn't need to. The list had done its job—not by giving me a sequence of achievements, but by gettingme out the door and into a clearing where a man with steady hands and a quiet voice showed me what it felt like to be seen.
I folded it back up. Put it away.
"Where do I go?" I asked.
