“You still should have told me,” I said.
“I know.”
“I’m not going to tell you it’s fine.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
The valley spread out below us, indifferent, unchanged, exactly as it had been before we started talking.
I pulled one hand out of my pocket and found his. We stood there at the rusted gate for another minute, both of us looking at the peaks, and neither of us said anything else.
Then I said, “Come on. I need more crackers.”
“There’s a second box in the cabinet,” he said.
“Of course there is.”
We walked back up the gravel road toward the cabin, his hand warm around mine, the pine smell sharp in the cold air. His thumb moved once across my knuckles — unhurried, not asking anything — and my breath went shallow in a way that had nothing to do with the altitude. I looked down at the thrift store boots on my feet — two weeks ago I had owned seventeen pairs of shoes worth more than this truck. I was currently walking uphill through Idaho in something that had previously belonged to a stranger and cost eleven dollars, and I was completely fine.
I was going to need to sit with that for a while.
Wells called Rafe’s phone an hour later while we were at the table with coffee going cold between us, not quite doing anything, just existing in the aftermath of the morning.
Rafe answered, listened for forty seconds, and said, “Good. Timeline on the return?”
Another pause. Then: “Understood.” He handed me the phone.
“Wells,” I said.
“They’ve got the operative,” Wells said. He’d slowed down — the relief-processing speed gone, replaced by something quieter. “Building is clear. Dad’s team says the window’s closing, the Harrington play is dead without the access. You can come home.”
“Okay.”
“London.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry I assumed you knew. I would have — I would have called sooner if I’d thought—”
“Wells. It’s fine.”
“Is it?”
I looked at Rafe across the table. He was watching me with the stillness he always had — contained, nothing performing.
“Yeah,” I said. “It actually is.”
I handed the phone back. Rafe set it on the table without looking away from me.
“Twenty-four hours,” he said. “We head back tomorrow morning.”
I nodded. The cabin was going to be behind us in less than a day — the sage and pine of it, the particular quiet that came from being somewhere nobody could schedule me.
“Tonight,” I said, “I want you to tell me about Montana winters. The real version. Not the weather-report version.”
Something in his face opened.
“The real version is longer,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “I’m not in a hurry.”
I reached for my coffee. It was cold. I drank it anyway and didn’t say a word about it, which was, I was beginning to understand, a thing I was capable of now.
