Page 7 of Ensnared By the Mountain Man

She holds my gaze for a long beat. The bakery is filling up behind me. I can hear chairs scraping and someone laughing and the bell above the door chiming. None of it registers because she’s looking at me like she’s seeing me for the first time, even though she’s been looking at me every morning for six months.

“I’m okay,” she says. Softer now. “Really.”

She’s not okay. I can see it in the way she’s gripping the edge of the counter with her left hand, taking the pressure off her ankle without realizing she’s doing it. She’s been standing on a bad sprain for at least an hour already, and she’ll stand on it for another six because that’s who she is. The woman who shows up. The woman who says yes. The woman who gives and gives until there’s nothing left and then gives some more.

I want to tell her to sit down. I want to walk behind that counter and pick her up and carry her to a chair and tell her that the world will keep turning if she takes one day off. I want to ask her who taught her that her own pain doesn’t matter, that everyone else’s comfort comes before hers, that I’m fine is an acceptable answer when she’s clearly not.

I don’t say any of that.

“I’ll bring the flannel back,” she says, and something about the way she says it makes me think she’s been thinking about it. About last night. About the cabin and the tea and the silence that sat between us like a living thing.

“Keep it,” I say.

The word comes out before I can stop it, and her lips part just slightly, and I realize I’ve been standing at this counter for longer than I’ve ever stood here in six months of mornings. There are people behind me. I should go. I should take my coffee and my muffin and leave before I say something else I can’t take back.

But I don’t want to leave.

That’s the problem. That’s been the problem since the first morning I walked in here and she smiled at me without expecting anything back. Leaving has always been the easy part for me. I leave. It’s what I do. I walk out the door and I don’t look back because looking back means caring about what I left behind, and caring is the thing I can’t afford.

I pick up the coffee. I pick up the muffin. She’s watching me, and I feel it the way you feel the sun on your back when you’re not facing it. You just know.

“Stay off it when you can,” I say. “Please.”

The please hangs in the air between us. I don’t say please. I give instructions, I state facts, I tell people what needs to happen and I expect them to do it.

But Morgan isn’t someone I can give orders to, and I don’t want that anyway. I want to be the man who says please to her and means it as something closer to I’m asking because you matter to me and I don’t know how to say that yet.

She nods slowly, like she’s actually hearing me. It’s a different nod from the one she gives customers, and I feel it somewhere deep.

I turn and walk out. The bell chimes behind me, the morning air hits my face, and I sit in my truck for another two minutes before I start the engine.

Three towns in four years. I came to Wildwood to disappear.

I don’t think that’s going to work anymore.

5

MORGAN

Three days after the mountain, and Elias Riggs is still coming into Sugar Moon every morning at 6:45.

That part isn’t new. What’s new is that he stays.

It started the morning after the rescue, when he stood at the counter and said my name and told me to stay off my ankle. The next day he came in at the same time, but he didn’t leave right away. He stood at the counter with his coffee and asked me how the ankle was doing. I told him it was better.

He looked at me like he was running the odds on whether I was lying. I could tell from his face that the odds weren’t in my favor.

The day after that, he came in earlier—6:30 instead of 6:45, before the rush, when the bakery is quiet and the only sounds are the ovens humming and the coffee machine cycling. He sat down. At an actual table. With his coffee and his muffin—and he stayed for almost fifteen minutes while I wiped counters and restocked the pastry case.

We didn’t say much, but the silence felt different than it used to. It used to feel like a wall. Now it feels like a door that’s been left open, and neither of us is sure who’s supposed to walk through first.

Today is day four, and when the bell chimes at 6:30, my heart does something I’ve given up trying to control.

“Morning,” I say.

“Morning.”

He steps up to the counter, and I pour his coffee without asking. Black, no sugar. I know this the way I know that Mrs. Kimball takes two sugars in her decaf and Dave Thacker takes his with nothing because he doesn’t believe in additives. But knowing Elias’s order feels different from knowing theirs. It feels private. Like a secret I’m keeping for him even though it’s just coffee.