Page 21 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"Once it's done, I'll drive you myself. That hasn't changed."
"I know." She holds my eyes for a beat, and there's something in hers that I can't fully read—something that might be frustration and might be the opposite of that entirely. Then she looks back at Lila. "One more day."
Lila doesn't bother hiding her smile. "Terrible news," she says, completely straight-faced.
Harper's mouth twitches. "Devastating," she agrees.
The table breaks up around nine. The night has gone cold in the way mountain nights do—suddenly and completely—the temperature having dropped a good fifteen degrees since sundown, the particular sharp cold of a mountain October that catches you off guard if you didn't grow up living in it. People peel off in ones and twos toward their own spaces. Declan says something loud as he goes; Nora tells him to keep his voice down, and neither of them adjusts their volume. Mateo walks with Lila toward the main building, deep in a quiet conversation I don't try to hear.
Harper is beside me on the path back toward the cabin, without it being a decision either of us made out loud. I notice this and don't comment on it.
The trail is dark between the lodge and the cabin, lit by the kind of sky you only get this far from city light—the full spread of it, dense and close, the kind of sky that makes the world feel very large and very quiet at the same time. Harper tips her head back to look at it as we walk and nearly loses her footing on a root and catches herself before I can reach for her elbow.
"I'm fine," she says before I can say anything.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
I was. "The root's been there for twenty years," I say instead. "Gets everyone."
"Has it gotten you?"
"No."
"Of course not." She looks back up at the sky. "It's incredible out here at night. Like, genuinely, actually incredible. I've never seen stars like that."
"Light pollution," I say. "Or the absence of it."
"Do you ever stop noticing it?"
I think about that honestly. "No," I say. "You solely stop being surprised by it. Which isn't the same thing."
She takes a moment of silence, thinking that over. I can see it on her face even in the low light—the way she actually sits with things rather than letting them pass.
We stop at the porch steps without planning to, the way you stop somewhere when neither person is quite ready to go inside. Harper sits on the top step and wraps her arms around her knees, and I settle on the lower one and look out at the treeline, and neither of us says anything for a minute that isn't uncomfortable.
Then she says, "Can I ask you something?"
"Yeah."
"How long have you been up here? Like, did you grow up here?"
I lean back and consider the question the way it deserves. "Born here," I say. "Third generation on this land. My grandfather started the timber operation, and my father built it into something that could actually sustain people." I pause. "When my father died, I was twenty-eight. The whole thing—the land, the operation, the people who depend on it—became mine."
"That's young to have all of that land on you."
"It was." I look up at the sky. "I'd had other ideas when I was younger. For a while, I thought about studying environmental law—there was a point where the land management work was running into some regulatory issues, and I thought maybe I could solve it from a different angle." I almost smile at the memory. "My father laughed. Not meanly. Simply, he knew, I think, before I did. That this was where I was going to end up."
"Do you resent it? Not getting to do the other thing?"
I think about it honestly rather than giving her the easy answer. "No," I say finally. "I did right after he died, when everything landed at once, and it was a lot. But no. This is mine. These people are mine." I pause. "I'd choose it again."
She's watching me when I glance over. "That's a rare thing," she says quietly. "Being able to say that about your life."
Something in her voice is careful in a way that tells me she's thinking about her own answer to that question. I let the quiet sit for a moment before I ask it.
"Could you? Say that about yours?"
