Page 19 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"You've got three vehicles coming up on service intervals," I tell him, pointing to the flagged column. "Within the next two weeks, if the mileage logs are accurate."
"They're accurate." He leans in and looks at the screen. "Hm."
"Hm good or hm problem?"
"Hm, I should have caught that." He straightens. "Thanks."
I close the laptop and stretch my hands, and I realize—sitting on a shop stool in a mountain garage—that I feel more useful than I have in months. Maybe longer. The nonprofit work had been good, meaningful even, but the last year of it had been swallowed by Dawson's events and Dawson's schedule and the particular drain of building a life around someone else's priorities without noticing you're doing it.
This afternoon, I built something small and functional that didn't exist before I sat down, and nobody asked me to, and nobody needed me to, and it was mine.
I don't examine that too closely. But I don't dismiss it either.
By the time I've sorted the last folder and closed the laptop, the light coming through the garage windows has gone to the particular gold of early evening. I thank Garrett, who says "hm" in the way I'm learning means something genuinely positive, and head for the door.
I nearly walk directly into Nora on the other side of it.
She catches herself, looks at me, and then looks past me into the garage with open curiosity. "Were you reorganizing Garrett's records?"
"He needed a system."
She stares for a moment like she's recalibrating something. Then she shakes it off, and the decision arrives on her face before she's said a word. "Perfect timing. Dinner's in ten minutes. Come on."
"Oh, I don't want to intrude on?—"
"Intrude on what? It's dinner. It happens every night."
"I know, but it's a group thing, and I'm not really?—"
"Harper." Nora plants herself in the doorway with the calm, immovable energy of a force that has won arguments with more formidable opposition than me and found none of them particularly challenging. "You sorted Lila's entire clinic this morning. You straight up reorganized the filing system that Garrett has been avoiding for six months. You are eating dinner with us."
"Garrett's been avoiding it for six months?"
"That's not the point." She steps aside and gestures up the path toward the lodge with the finality of a conversation that has already been decided, whether I've caught up to that or not. "Ten minutes. Come on."
I open my mouth.
She raises an eyebrow.
"Okay," I say.
The lodgein the evening is a different thing from the lodge in the morning. The overhead lights are lower, the fire is going properly, and the long table is set with the casual practicality of people who eat together regularly and don't make a ceremony of it. Mateo and Declan are back from patrol, Mateo looking precisely as composed as he did when he left, and Declan looking like he's been outside all day and enjoyed every second of it. Lila is already at the table with her notebook. Garrett arrives exactlyat six, washed up, and takes the same seat he probably always takes.
Logan is at the far end.
He's in a clean flannel, sleeves pushed up the way they always seem to be, and he has a glass of water in front of him, and he's listening to something Mateo is saying with the focused, unhurried attention he gives everything. He looks in my direction when I enter—briefly, purely for a second—and the quality of his stillness shifts in that way it does and then settles.
I sit down across from Lila and tell myself I didn't notice.
Dinner is—it's good. It's genuinely and surprisingly good. Nora made something with venison that she refuses to call a stew, despite it being clearly a stew; the bread came from somewhere, and nobody will confirm where; and the conversation moves the way conversation moves when people are comfortable enough to let it go anywhere.
Declan tells a story about the patrol that involves a territorial dispute with what he describes as "the most aggressive squirrel I have ever encountered in my professional career," which somehow goes on for four minutes and gets better as it goes. Lila gently fact-checks him at two points and is cheerfully ignored both times. Nora and Mateo argue about something related to the southern trail that I don't have enough context to follow but am entertained by regardless.
And through all of it, I sit at this table with people I just met and feel settled. Settled is the right word. Early and unearned and entirely real.
I glance down the table without meaning to and find Logan already looking at me. He doesn't look away. Neither do I, for a beat longer than I should, and then Declan says something that pulls the table's attention, and the moment releases.
I pick up my fork, look at my plate, and think about the car sitting in the garage, being taken apart and assessed, deeper into it than Garrett expected.
