Page 20 of Claimed on the Ridge

The stove clicks three times before the burner catches, and the small blue flame throws shadows across the counter that shift when the draft moves.

My hands aren't shaking.

My palms are flat against the counter and they're still. They're not gripping, not bracing, not curled into the half-fists I've been carrying since Sitka.

The steadiness feels foreign, like wearing someone else's skin.

The kettle ticks against the burner as the water heats.

My eyes move through the kitchen. The window has no curtains and the pale light from the starry sky casts just enough light to make moving through the kitchen feasible. Iron skillets hang from a rack above the stove, seasoned black and heavy. The cutting board by the sink has a groove worn into one corner from years of the same knife landing in the same place. The spice rack on the wall is half-empty, the jars mismatched. The labels have faded to illegibility. A mug tree by the coffee pot holds mugs that don't match either.

Nobody has organized them by size or color, and nobody ever will.

Gary's kitchen had marble counters and a six-burner Viking range and copper pots that hung from a ceiling rack like sculpture. Everything matched. Everything was placed. I wasn't allowed to rearrange the spice rack because the alphabetical order was the order, and deviating from the order was a conversation I learned not to start.

This kitchen has no order. It has use. The surfaces are worn where hands have rested, the wood scarred where knives have slipped, the drawers soft on their tracks from years of opening.

Nobody cares where I put my mug. Nobody is tracking which drawer I open or how long I stand with the refrigerator door ajar.

The freedom of it is so small and so enormous that I have to close my eyes for a moment and breathe through it.

The kettle whistles. I pour coffee into the mug and wrap both hands around it. The heat moves through my fingers into my wrists and down into the tension I've been carrying in my forearms for days.

A floorboard creaks overhead.

My body goes still. The mug pauses halfway to my mouth.

I track the creak the way I track every noise in an unfamiliar building: location, weight, direction. It came from the hallway upstairs, near the end where the bedrooms are, and the weight behind it is too heavy to be the lodge settling.

Then the stairs begin, one by one, unhurried. The third step gets sidestepped, which means it's someone who lives here.

Alex appears in the kitchen doorway.

He's in a T-shirt and flannel pants, barefoot, and the domesticity of the image is so far from the man who splits wood and fills doorframes that my brain stutters on it.

His hair is disordered, pushed back from his face, and the stubble along his jaw has gone past shadow into the early stages of a beard.

He looks at me. He looks at the coffee. He doesn't look surprised.

"Couldn't sleep," I say.

"Heard the kettle." His voice is rougher than usual, lower, the edges of it blurred by sleep or the absence of it. He leans against the doorframe the way he leans against every doorframe, as if the building offered itself up as a backrest and he accepted.

"I can go back upstairs."

"You can stay."

I stay.

He makes coffee. Even at this hour, even barefoot in flannel pants, the movements are efficient and practiced.

He doesn't turn on the overhead light. The blue flame of the stove and the glow from the dying fire in the main room are the only sources, and the dimness makes the kitchen feel smaller, the edges of the room softened into shadow.

"You always make coffee at two in the morning?" I ask.

"You always wander through other people's kitchens at two in the morning?"

"Only when the kitchens are this disorganized. It's a public service. Someone should intervene."