“No practice,” he says against my hair, and I can hear the smile in it even without seeing his face. “Just paying attention. Turns out it's not complicated once you actually care about getting it right.”
“You're beautiful,” he murmurs against my ear a moment later, low enough that I feel it more than hear it. “Every inch of you. Every mark I left last night. You're mine, and I don't say that lightly.”
I shiver, the water rippling around us with the small motion. He washes my hair last, fingers massaging slow circles into my scalp, warm water rinsing through in streams that leave me boneless and unhurried against him, every worry from the day before rinsing off with it. I don't think about the boot print, or the window, or anything waiting outside this small warm room. There's just him, and the water, and the particular safety of being taken care of by somebody who means it.
What happens after that stays between the two of us and the steam and the low, easy sounds of the water, tender and unhurried in a way that feels like its own kind of care rather than anything separate from it. I learn things about him in that bath I don't think I'd have learned any other way, the low catch in his breath, the way his hands go careful even when everything else in him wants to rush, the sound of my name in his voice when I finally understand exactly how much he means every word he's been telling me since the wreck. It's slow, and it's ours, and when it's over he pulls me back against his chest and just holds me there while the water cools slow around us both.
“Good girl,” he says quietly, kissing my temple. “You did so good.”
We get out once the water's gone from hot to merely warm, and he dries me off with a big towel, patting me dry from shoulders to toes with the same unhurried care he's given everything else this morning. He dresses me in his clothes again, the flannel soft and oversized, the pants rolled twice at the cuff, and he takes his time with every step, his touch lingering, his eyes warm the whole way through. The soreness is still there, quieter now, but the bath helped, and honestly his attention helps more than the hot water ever could have on its own.
“I should check the perimeter,” he says eventually, though he doesn't move to do it right away, still holding me against his chest like he's not quite ready to let the morning end. “And I want to radio Mason. See if there's been any movement on the print, or the truck, or anything at all we can actually use.”
“Do you think today's the day,” I ask quietly, “when everything catches up to us?”
“I don't know.” He's honest instead of reassuring, which I've come to trust more than easy comfort at this point. “Could be today. Could be another week. I'm not going to promise you a timeline I don't actually have. What I can promise is I'm not leaving your side until I know exactly what we're dealing with.”
“And after that? Once you do know?”
“Then we deal with it. Together, however that ends up looking.” He tips my chin up so I'm looking at him instead of the middle distance where my worry usually lives. “I meant what I said the other night. I'm not planning on a version of this where you just disappear one day and I go back to living alone up here like none of this happened.”
I nod, and let myself believe that's enough for right now, because the alternative is spending this whole gentle morning drowning in a fear that hasn't actually arrived yet.
“Can I ask you something else,” I say, tracing a fingertip along the seam of his shirt where it's rolled at his forearm. “What happens to this cabin? If I'm gone, into witness protection, or wherever I end up. Do you just, go back to how it was before?”
Something crosses his face, quick and pained, before he answers. “I don't know how to answer that honestly without it sounding like a threat to whatever plan they come up with for you. So I'm just not going to plan for that version. I'm planning for the one where I don't have to find out what this cabin feels like without you in it.”
“That's either the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me or a pretty concerning amount of denial,” I say, mostly joking, though my chest goes tight and warm at the same time.
“Can be both.” He kisses the top of my head. “I've made peace with that.”
We spend the rest of the morning by the fire after that, the connection between us stronger than it's ever been, stitched tighter by every quiet hour and every hard conversation and, now, by this too. The storm's over. The world's still out there waiting, patient and dangerous in equal measure. But for now, in this cabin, it's just us, and I find myself hoping, quietly and a little desperately, that we get a hundred more mornings exactly like this one before the world remembers we exist.
16
Colt
Dusk comes down purple and quiet over the mountain, and I'm out in it, walking my trap line one more time before dark. The storm's dying. The wind that howled for days has dropped to a whisper through the pines, and the silence should feel like relief. It doesn't, not entirely. We know now the window wasn't an animal, wasn't a branch, wasn't ice working loose in the frame the way I tried telling myself before Nora crouched down in the snow and found that print herself. What we don't know is who, or why they haven't made another move since, and that uncertainty sits worse in my gut than the original mystery ever did.
I check each trap slower than I need to, giving myself time to think while my hands do work they don't need supervising for. Somewhere around the fourth one I catch myself running through what it would take to get Nora off this mountain entirely if it came to that, a cabin I know two ridges over that nobody but me and Mason has ever set foot in, a route down the back side that doesn't touch the main road at all. I don't like that my mind's already building an exit plan. I like even less that somepart of me has already decided I'd use it, rules or no rules, the second things got bad enough to justify it.
Every trap sits undisturbed tonight. No prints but mine and the neat stitching of a fox that crossed the lower trail sometime this afternoon. The mountain's telling me we're alone up here, at least for tonight, and I trust the mountain more than I trust most people, so I let my shoulders come down an inch and head back, snow squeaking under my boots, the cabin windows glowing gold through the trees like something out of a story instead of a life I actually get to have.
Inside, the heat wraps around me, and so does the sight of her. Nora's cross legged on the bed in my flannel, hair still damp from this morning's bath, the notebook balanced on her knee, her tongue caught at the corner of her mouth the particular way it always is when a drawing's putting up a fight. She doesn't jump when the door opens anymore. She just looks up, and her whole face goes soft, and something in my chest that's been wound tight since I found that broken glass eases off its trigger, quiet and immediate, the way it only does around her.
“Anything out there?” she asks.
“Fox. Big one. Probably the same troublemaker that's been robbing my snares all winter.” I hang my coat and cross to the bed. “What are you working on?”
She tilts the notebook against her chest, sudden and shy about it, which is new. She'll show me a grumpy moose without blinking twice. “It's not done.”
“Show me anyway.”
She hesitates, then turns it around. It's us. Two little cartoon figures on a mountain trail, a huge bearded one loaded downwith traps and rope and a rolled up tent, and a small round cheeked one behind him carrying nothing but a pencil the size of a canoe paddle. Mountain adventurers. She's given the big one my exact scowl, down to the crease between the eyebrows I didn't know I had until she drew it there.
“That supposed to be me?”
“The scowl says yes.” She's watching my face, and under the joke there's a question she's too smart to ask out loud. Is it okay that I'm drawing us. That I'm drawing a future.
