Page 8 of Fated, Allegedly

On Monday we go in at five-forty in the morning and it's the best one I've had in a year, which says a great deal about the last twelve months.

He moves through the country like he belongs. No wasted steps, no crashing, and he keeps putting his hand back for the steep bits without looking to see if I've taken it. He knows the name of everything. Not the field-guide names, the local ones, the ones you only get from someone whose grandfather also walked here.

"That's a witch's broom," I say, pointing at a pine.

"It's not, it's Wyatt's fault. He climbed it at fourteen and broke the leader."

"How is that a real memory you have?"

"Small county," he says, which I'm starting to recognize as his entire personality compressed into two words.

We hit the old timber bridge at nine. It spans a gorge over Cutter Creek, fifty feet of gap and maybe thirty down onto rock, decked in ancient planking with a handrail that's more suggestion than structure. Nash steps on and off the first plank twice, testing.

"It held last October," he says. "Single file. Stay on the…"

And then he stops talking and his head comes up. I don't hear anything. There's water below us and wind in the pines and nothing else. But he is still in a manner I've only seen in animals, entirely committed, weight already shifting backward.

"Off," he says. "Now."

I'm four steps out on the wooden planks and as I turn, a plank under my boot lets go with a crack like a rifle shot.

I drop, and my arms fly outward. My ribs slam the stringer and my legs are hanging over thirty feet of creek boulder, and I'm scrabbling at wet timber with fingers that have suddenly forgotten their purpose. His hand closes around my wrist, and he hauls me up the entire length of my body one-handed and gets me flat on the decking, and we lie there while the bridge groans and sheds planks into the gorge one at a time like it's counting.

"Don't move," he says. His voice is absolutely level. His heart, under my ear, is not.

We crawl sixteen feet on our stomachs to the far anchor, and I'm looking down the whole time through the gaps at white water, and when we roll off onto solid ground I laugh until I nearly throw up. Then I go back and look at the stringer.

"Nash." My hands have start shaking. "Come here."

The break isn't normal. There's a saw kerf running two-thirds through the beam, clean and square, and the remaining third is fresh splintered wood. Somebody cut it and left exactly enough to hold up a person standing still and not a person walking.

"That's a trap," I say. "That's not sabotage, someone with a handsaw and altered it…"

"I know."

"You knew before it went." I turn on him. "You said off before the wood made a sound. I was watching you. There was nothing to hear."

He holds my eyes, he could lie. I can see him considering it, but he chooses against it, and what he says instead is worse and better both.

"I won't insult you," he says quietly. "I'd like to be honest with you. I just can't yet. Can you give me time?"

Two weeks ago I'd have burned the forest down over an answer like that.

I pick up my pack instead. "You pulled me up one-handed."

"You held on."

"I did." I look at the gorge, then at him. "You'd have gone in with me if I hadn't. You were already leaning."

He doesn't deny it. We walk out the long way, four extra miles, and he takes half my gear without discussing it, and I let him.

6

NASH

Idrop her at the cabin at four p.m. with a bruised set of ribs she keeps insisting are fine, and I drive to my father's house with sawdust still in my head.

The elders are already gathered on Owen's porch when I pull in, which tells me Wyatt's mouth got there ahead of me. Hazel's in the good chair with a mug of tea and her cane hooked over the arm. My mother's at the rail with her sleeves pushed up, and she glances at my hands before she looks at my face, because she's been a healer for forty years and that's the order she does things in.