She shakes her head. "You can't bullshit a bullshitter, Afon. Hit me. What's the bad news?"
So I tell her what happened. She listens all the way through without interrupting, which a week ago I'd have said she was physically incapable of.
"So it's gone? All of it?" she asks when I finish.
"Every last bite. Coyotes have good taste."
She closes her eyes. "I regret complaining about the venison. The universe has punished me for my hubris by repoing the only thing we had that mattered." She lets out a sad exhale. "This is my fault."
"No," I disagree. "It's just a thing that happened. That's life."
We both conveniently ignore the fact that this might have been avoided, at least in part, if we hadn't gotten a little carried away last night. I don't exactly feel guilty about it—not that aspect of it at least—but that's probably because I can still taste her honey on my tongue.
"Okay," she says. "So we're down to beans. How long can we?—"
"Not long enough," I interrupt." She doesn't even argue, which tells me how seriously she's taking this. "And there's a storm coming in that's going to be worse than anything you've seen up here. It'll pin us down for most of a week. The food won't last that long. Even if it did, once the weather breaks…"
"They'll come looking."
I nod. "Yes."
"How comforting." She pushes the quilt off and swings her legs over the side of the bed, wincing only slightly when the bad ankle takes weight. She's healing. The question is, is she healedenough? "So what's the plan? Because I know you, and you didn't come through that door without a plan."
I wince. This is the part I was dreading.
"We go down."
Caroline goes still. "How soon?" she asks in a weak voice.
"Within the hour, while the storm is building but before it peaks. And…" I hesitate. "… we have to walk."
"Walk?!" she bleats. "Afon, we have a snowmobile! It's right outside!"
"It's too loud. The minute I start that engine, every man in that camp knows exactly which slope we're on. On the machine, we're fast and obvious. On foot, in this weather, we're slow and invisible. Slow and invisible wins."
"Fuck, I hate when you're right. How far is it?"
"Fourteen miles."
I see her doing the same mental route I did. She's not dumb, just out of her element. "What about my ankle?"
"I'll wrap it, and I'll set the pace. We'll stop when I say stop and move when I say move. There's a hunting lean-to at the seven-mile mark if we need it, and I'm guessing we probably will." I crouch down in front of her, so we're eye level. "I won't pretend it's going to be anything but miserable. You're going to be colder than you've ever been. Your ankle is going to hate me, and so are you. But I didn't pull you out of that bunkhouse to watch you starve."
Her eyes are huge and liquid. And, more importantly, brimming over with trust I know I haven't earned.
"What happens when we get there?" she asks.
"That part, I'm still working on. Luckily, we have fourteen miles' worth of thinking time."
I'm not ready to tell her about the sat phone in my pocket or whose number lives in it. We cross one bridge at a time, and that one's still on fire. "First, we hike. The other problems will still be waiting for us at the bottom of the mountain."
She looks at me, uncertain. Outside, the snow is going from sideways to something with intent, ticking against the rippled window like thrown gravel.
"Caroline." I take her hands. She clutches back immediately. "Do you trust me?"
We both know the full extent of what I'm asking. I've lied to her before—and, fuck, I'm still lying to her right now, if only by omission. I'm asking her to trust the man who put her on a bench in Pike Hollow and drove away. Trust the man who still hasn't told her what her father did, or what I did, or why the answer to both will hurt.
Her chin comes up an inch, the Oglethorpe chin, Bill's stubborn jaw on Susan's face.
