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“Hazel.”

She stopped. She wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was looking at the collection envelopes, and her hands were very still.

“I can’t keep putting it off,” she said quietly. “The caves. I need to go.” She set the envelope down carefully. “Grandma might still be right about everything.”

I waited.

“But what if it isn’t real?” Her thumb rubbed over the edge of the paper. “Then she was just a sick old woman with a beautiful notebook, and every professor who mocked my proposal was correct about both of us.”

I’d studied her grandmother’s hand-drawn map carefully. She drew the ground right—the creek, the limestone shelf, the trail past the sinkhole. No one got the ground right by imagining it.

“She walked that country,” I said.

Hazel looked up.

“I’ll take you to the caves.”

Her eyes stayed on mine. “When?”

“Dawn.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Some of it. I know the route.” She’d be safe with me.

She searched my face. I let her look because I owed her that, and because I’d never been much good at hiding what I felt.

What the caves meant to me sat on my tongue. I struggled to find the words to explain what the deep dark did to the animal under my skin. What it wanted when it got close to a den. Two sentences would have done it.

I didn’t say them.

She was asking whether the ground was safe. It was. I’d walked it a dozen times. What lived underneath my skin in the dark was mine to manage.

I reached across and pushed her hair back behind her ear. Absently, the way I’d brush sawdust off a finished surface. Her skin was warm. Her pulse ticked against my knuckle. She kept talking. I didn’t listen. Couldn’t. Not with only five days left.

My hand dropped. I didn’t do it again.

“I’ll service the Jeep tonight,” I said. “Check the tires and the winch cable.”

“That’d be great.” She was already reaching for Grandma’s journal, sketching a grid over the cave map. Marking entry points. Noting where the limestone changed character.

Planning the way out.

I picked up the grafting knife, put it back in the drawer, and went outside to check the Jeep.

The bear pressed against my ribs. Den. Take her under. Keep. I closed my eyes.

There were things a man could choose. There were things a bear could want. If I ever let the second one make the choice, there wouldn’t be a man left to want anything.

The rain had started. I stood in it for a while, scanning the treeline in the direction of the caves. I did what I always did with a hazard tree—assessed the fall, the direction of the weight, the ground beneath it.

And where I’d be standing when it came down.

Chapter 10

Hazel

Something had been wrong since yesterday.