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“The nine-word man,” she says, “just wrecked me with four. ‘I came for you.’”

“You counted.”

“I always count now. You ruined me.” She fists my shirt tighter, doesn’t let go. “Don’t go yet.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I mean it. The same way I mean the work, the same way I mean everything I don’t put into words. I mean it with her cold face warming against my palm in the amber light.

I kiss her again. The wind pulls at the canopy, and the canopy holds. She holds onto me. For tonight, that’s the whole world, and it’s enough.

7

NIKKI

“Come here,” Wade says. “I want to show you something.”

It’s the most words he’s strung together unprompted in three days, and he says them with his hand still warm on the side of my face. At this point, I’d follow them just about anywhere.

“I open in the morning.” It comes out weak. “First day. I should sleep. I should be responsible and boring and go to bed.”

“You should.” He stands, and pulls me up off the step by both hands. “Twenty minutes. Then I’ll walk you home and you can be boring.”

I go. Of course I go. He laces his fingers through mine like it’s a thing he’s always done, and we leave Punkin’s dark and staked-down safe. He walks me off the end of Prospect, where the shops give out and a service track climbs up into the trees.

The strip glows behind us, amber and small. The wind’s dropped to nothing. Up we go, his boots sure on the dark track, my hand in his, until the trees open all at once into a clearing I’ve never seen.

He did this. I know it before he says a word. Fresh stumps, pale and low. Sawdust thick underfoot, the whole clearing smelling of cut pine and cold air. Where a stand of dead trees must have crowded this slope a week ago, there’s nothing now but open ground and, above it, a hole cut clean out of the forest canopy, and through the hole⁠—

“Oh,” I say.

Stars. All of them. The whole spilled dome of them, thick and close the way they only get up here away from the lights, framed in the black edges of the trees he left standing.

“Defensible-space job.” He stops at the center of the clearing, looking up with me. “Took the dead ones out this week. Fire district flagged the stand. You clear the deadfall back from the tree line so a ground fire can’t ladder up into the crowns.” He’s quiet a second. “Wasn’t until I dropped the last one that I saw what it opened up.”

“Wade.” I turn a slow circle under it, neck craned. “You cut a window in the sky.”

“Didn’t mean to.” He watches me turn instead of watching the stars. “It’s just what was behind them.”

I stop turning and look at him. He’s giving me this the only way he gives anything, sideways, calling it a work detail, a flagged stand, a thing that just happened to open up. But he walked me up a dark mountain the night before my opening to stand me under the one view in this valley you can’t get anywhere else, and he did it without a single word about why. I understand that this is Wade handing me his whole heart and calling it deadfall clearance.

“You brought me here to show me the sky,” I say.

“I brought you here to show you what came out from behind the dead stuff.” He looks at me full on now, and his voice drops, careful, every word set down like it costs. “You keep thinking the quiet’s a wall. It’s not the wall. It’s what’s behind it. I’m no good at saying the behind-it part. So I—” He gestures, one rough hand, at the clearing, the stumps, the open sky. “I show it.”

My throat closes. Nobody has ever tried this hard to be understood by me. Nobody has ever cleared a mountainside and called it nothing.

“I hear it,” I tell him. “I finally hear the quiet. It’s the loudest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

He crosses the sawdust and kisses me, and this one isn’t a careful kiss like before. This one has three days behind it, and a cleared sky over it, and both his hands framing my face like he’s done deciding to be gentle about wanting me.

I fist my hands in his flannel and pull him down and kiss him back with everything I usually spend on being loud. All of it is poured into this instead, into him, into the quiet.

He walks me back a step, and another, until my spine meets the smooth cut face of the biggest stump, waist-high, and his hands leave my face to find my waist. I feel the want come off him in the press of him, in the careful way his fingers spread at the small of my back like he’s holding something he means to keep.

“Wade.” I pull back an inch. I make myself say it, because he’s given me the truth all night and he should have mine. “I haven’t— I’ve never done this. Any of it. I wanted you to know before.”

He goes still under my hands. Not backing off. Still, the way he goes still before a cut, all his attention narrowing down to one thing, and the one thing is me.