Page 25 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
I stand there for another moment, and I think about Dawson's reasonable voice on camera, and the eight months of messages, and my mother already composing her response to the situation, and all the people in that orbit waiting for me to surface so they can have a position on it.
And then I think about the mountains, and the quiet, and the particular relief of being somewhere that none of that has reached yet.
I'm not ready to give that up.
Not today.
10
LOGAN
Garrett finds me before dinner two days from our last conversation.
He comes up the path from the garage with his hands in his jacket pockets and that particular expression he wears when he's delivering news he's already fully processed and is waiting for everyone else to catch up to him. He stops at the foot of the porch steps and looks up at me.
"Car's done," he announces.
"Good work," I tell him and mean it. He'd turned it around faster than he'd originally estimated, which is Garrett's standard operating procedure—under-promise, over-deliver, and say very little about either.
He nods once. Then: "Weather's coming in."
I'd already felt it. The particular pressure drop that moves through the mountains before a system arrives, the way the air takes on a specific quality that most people can't read, and I've been reading my whole life. By late afternoon, the cloud cover had dropped, and the temperature had shifted, and by the time dinner came around, there was the low, steady sound of wind picking up through the upper ridge.
"Road conditions?" I ask.
"Already getting soft on the north face. If it comes in overnight the way it looks like it will, the pass won't be safe until it clears." He pauses. "Could be morning. Could be longer."
"I'll tell her tonight," I say.
He nods and heads back toward the garage.
I findHarper at dinner already in the middle of a conversation with Nora and Declan that appears to have started somewhere reasonable and gone somewhere else entirely. She's got that look on her face—the dry, sharp one that means she's about to say something that will make the whole table react—and whatever she says next does exactly that, Declan making a noise of protest while Nora laughs and Lila looks up from her notebook with a smile she tries to hide and doesn't.
I take the end seat and watch her exist inside this group of people with an ease that wasn't there three days ago and is undeniable now, and my wolf does what it always does in these moments—settles into that low, attentive stillness that I've stopped trying to talk it out of.
I wait until after dinner, when the table is clearing and the conversation is breaking into smaller pieces. Harper is helping Nora carry plates to the kitchen, which nobody asked her to do and which she does anyway, which is the most Harper thing I have observed her do yet.
I catch her on the way back through.
"Garrett finished the car," I tell her.
She looks up at me, and her face carries something I've learned to give time before I decide what it is. "That's good," she replies, carefully.
"It is. There's a problem with the road, though." I keep my voice even. "Weather's coming in overnight. The pass won't besafe to drive until it clears—could be by morning; it could take a little longer depending on how the system moves through."
She takes that in. "So we wait for the weather."
"Once it clears, I'll drive you myself. We leave when the road's ready and you are."
She withholds words for a brief moment, turning her mug in both hands with the focused inwardness she gets when something is still being assembled. Then she nods. "Okay," she replies. "Tomorrow morning then, if the weather holds."
Something about the way she says it—matter-of-fact, already moving on, the decision made and filed—sits in my chest in a way I don't examine out loud.
"Okay," I say back.
She drifts back toward the group after that, easy and unhurried, and I step outside to pull up the weather service on my phone. The forecast confirms what Garrett read in the air—a system moving through overnight, the pass road flagged as a weather closure until conditions improve. Estimated clearance early in the morning if the system moves through at the projected pace. Possibly later.
I send Mateo a message.
