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“I’ll bank the fire,” I said. “You should sleep. Early start tomorrow.”

Hazel got up, came around the table, and stopped in front of me. She lifted a hand toward my chest, paused, and then said, very softly, “You haven’t asked me anything.”

Ask her. Ask her. Ask her to stay.

“You know your own mind,” I said instead.

I watched her consider this, weigh it. I hoped she’d hear it as respect.

Her hand remained poised, unplaced. Then she nodded slowly and stepped past me toward the bedroom. The latch clicked, softly, just as it had after the caves. I stood in the kitchen, my hand resting on the door frame.

I didn’t want to be the animal that would want to keep her, so I was choosing not to be him. The man she’d asked to take her to the caves was going to carry her crate out to her Jeep, and he was going to be all right.

Keep, my bear said, once, quietly, before falling silent for the night.

I ignored him and banked the fire

Chapter 12

Hazel

I woke before Barrett.

For several minutes, I lay still beneath the quilt and listened to the cabin. The fire had burned low during the night. Wind moved softly through the trees outside, occasionally brushing a branch against the roof. Somewhere beyond the bedroom wall, the refrigerator hummed.

Barrett wasn't beside me. I reached across the mattress anyway, but it was cold.

I closed my eyes. I’d slept badly because for the first time in my life, knowing what I wanted and knowing what I was supposed to want had become two entirely different things.

I reached for Grandma’s journal on the nightstand. I’d read it so many times that the binding had softened beneath my hands. As a child, I’d loved the pressed flowers. As a student, I’d focused on locations, growing conditions, flowering seasons—anything I could test, categorize, and turn into evidence. Later, when Grandma became ill, I’d read it looking for the plant.

Somewhere along the way, I’d started treating the whole journal like a trail leading to that blue flower in the cave.

I opened it now.

A sprig of dried lavender lay beneath a sheet of protective paper.

Outside the kitchen. June. Bees everywhere.

A few pages later, pressed clover.

Picnic by Miller’s Creek. Thomas fell asleep and burned one side of his face.

I smiled. Grandpa Thomas had died before I was old enough to remember him properly, but Grandma had talked about him often enough that I knew his laugh had been too loud, his coffee too strong, and he considered instructions a personal insult.

For years, I’d looked through these pages and seen botany.

I’d missed the life threaded through it.

Grocery lists. Weather notes. Recipes. Sketches of the house. A maple leaf from a walk with my mother. A tiny pink flower from the year I was born.

Beside it, Grandma had written:

Hazel asleep in the sling. Wouldn’t put her down for anything.

I touched the words.

The journal wasn’t a catalog. It had never been a catalog. It was a life.