Page 17 of Claimed on the Ridge

"Bryan."

He picks up the mug. Drinks. The conversation is over in the way Bryan's conversations are always over, which is to say he's made his point and will hold it in reserve until the moment it does the most damage.

I can feel it sitting behind his silence, patient and steady.

The kitchen door opens and Kendall comes in. Different shirt today, a worn henley with the sleeves pushed past her elbows, which means her bag held more than I assumed.

The bag is still on her shoulder, same practiced scan of the room before her feet stop moving.

Her hair is pushed back from her face, and the line of her jaw is sharper without it. I'm tracking it before my first cup is finished and I need to stop.

"Morning," she says. Her eyes move from me to Bryan and back.

"Coffee's fresh," I say.

"Storm update?" She asks it casually, but the question has weight.

'A few more days.'The words are ready. They sit on my tongue, shaped and rehearsed.

"A few more days," I say. "Second front moving in behind the first. Roads are going to stay closed for a while."

Her expression doesn't change. The composure holds.

But her hand drifts to the strap of her bag, fingers brushing the buckle once before the hand drops back to her side. Too fast to be casual.

"Okay," she says. One word. Flat and measured.

She pours coffee and takes it to the table, and Bryan watches her sit down with the attention of a man who has just watched his brother withhold information from a woman who deserved the full picture.

I meet Bryan's eyes across the kitchen. His expression says everything it needs to say.

He picks up his phone. Resumes reading. The judgment doesn't need words. It fills every corner of the room without them.

By midmorning the woodpile on the porch needs restocking. The covered stack behind the lodge is accessible but buried under drift, and the job requires two people: one to dig and one to haul.

Cameron is elbow-deep in the generator's fuel filter housing. Dash is somewhere being Dash.

"I can help," Kendall says.

She's standing in the mudroom doorway, already pulling on the borrowed coat.

She isn't asking. She's informing me, and the distinction registers somewhere it shouldn't.

"It's heavy work."

"I grew up in a house with a woodstove. I know what a log weighs."

The response is flat and factual, and it shuts down the objection so cleanly that arguing would require me to admit the objection wasn't about the weight.

The real objection was about the borrowed coat, the cold, the fact that she's thinner than she should be. None of those are reasons I'm going to say out loud.

"Gloves are on the shelf," I say. "The thick ones."

The work is straightforward. I dig. She hauls. The rhythm of it establishes itself within minutes, and the efficiency of her is disorienting.

She doesn't need instructions. She watches what I do, adjusts, and falls into the pattern.

When I hand her a split log, she takes it with both hands, shifts the weight to her hip, and walks to the porch stack without wasted motion. Her boots find the packed snow between the drifts on the first try.