Page 6

"Only to someone paying attention." She pats my hand once, brief and warm. "You don't have to tell me anything. Just know this mountain's kept plenty of secrets before yours."

Something about the way she says it settles a little of the tension I've been carrying since the break-in, and for the rest of the morning we work in easy silence, punctuated only by the sound of pods snapping and rain starting to tap against the windows.

Kellan arrives a little after noon, saying something about the woodpile needing restocking before the next storm, though I suspect Yvonne arranged it deliberately, the way she's been quietly engineering our overlap since day one. I don't mind. If anything, I've been looking forward to it.

We spend the afternoon in the woods behind Yvonne's property, him splitting logs with an efficiency that makes the work look almost effortless, me hauling the split pieces to the growing stack by the shed.

"You don't have to keep up with me," Kellan says at one point, watching me drag another armload toward the stack.

"I'm not trying to keep up. I'm trying to be useful." I drop the wood and straighten, working a kink out of my back. "Do you know how long it's been since anyone let me do actual physical work instead of a staged workout for a magazine spread?"

"Can't say I do."

"Too long. This is basically a vacation."

That gets one of his rare, low laughs, and I find myself chasing that sound more than I probably should.

We work until the light starts slanting gold through the trees, and somewhere in the rhythm of it, between the swing of his axe and the scrape of logs against my palms, he starts talking. Not much, and never anything that feels like an actual confession, but small things. That he grew up on this mountain. That his family's gone now, all of them, though he doesn't say how. That he prefers the cold months because the forest gets quieter and he likes quiet more than most people understand.

"You keep circling around things," I say eventually, sitting on an overturned log while he finishes the last of the splitting. "You'll tell me you grew up here, but not who raised you. You'll say your family's gone, but not what happened."

He pauses mid-swing, axe resting against the block. "Not really a story I tell people."

"I noticed. You don't have to. I just notice things too."

Whatever he's protecting, it clearly costs him something to keep it locked away, and I'm not about to be the person who makes that cost higher.

By evening we've moved the conversation inside, Yvonne having tactfully mentioned an early night and left us the run of her sitting room, fire crackling in the hearth while rain finally lets loose outside. I curl into the armchair with a mug of the tea Yvonne left out, and Kellan sits across from me on the low bench near the fire, more relaxed than I've seen him yet.

"Tell me something real," I say. "Not the mountain-man version. The actual you."

"That's a big ask."

"I've told you about the attack. About my old team, my old life, all of it. Seems fair."

He considers that, turning his mug slowly in his hands. "I used to be different," he says finally. "Before. Talked more. Laughed more, probably, though it's been long enough I'm not entirely sure I remember correctly."

"What changed?"

"Lost people I loved. Learned that caring about someone means you can lose them, and losing them is worse than never having them at all." He says it plainly, no self-pity in it, just fact. "Made it simpler to stop letting people in."

"That sounds lonely."

"It's safer."

"Those aren't the same thing."

He looks up at that, something shifting behind his eyes, and for a moment neither of us says anything at all. The fire pops in the silence. Rain keeps hammering the windows. And I feel, more than I think, that we've crossed some line neither of us planned on crossing tonight.

"No," he says finally, quietly. "They're not."

We keep talking after that, easier things — favorite seasons, terrible childhood memories, the strangest requests I've ever gotten from fans, which makes him laugh harder than anything else has all day. By the time the fire's burned down to embers and the rain's softened to a drizzle, I've told him more real things about myself than I've told anyone in years, and he's given me pieces of himself too, small and careful, like someone handing over something breakable.

When he finally stands to leave, walking me the short distance back to my own cabin under a sky just starting to clear, we stop at my porch steps and neither of us moves to say goodnight right away.

"Thank you for today," I say. "All of it. The wood, the stories, the tea I definitely stole from Yvonne's cabinet."

"She won't miss it."