Page 43 of Claimed on the Ridge

We dress without talking. She adjusts the flannel and her jeans. When she bends to pick up her bra from the floor, the flannel rides up and the curve of her lower back catches the light. The scratch marks from my hands are faint red lines across her hip. My body remembers making them. The memory is immediate, physical, and useless for the conversation I need to have before this morning is over.

I watch her move through my room, picking up her clothes from the places I put them last night, and the weight of what comes next presses down on every second of it. The pass is opening, and every instinct I have says she'll be on that road the minute it's clear. She has a bag on the floor by her bed and boots pointed at the door, and the clock is running on how long I can keep what I know to myself.

She finishes dressing and heads for the door. I follow her downstairs, past the third step, into a kitchen that's gone cold overnight. The fire burned down while we slept. I rebuild it while she makes coffee, and the routine of it feels like something we've been doing longer than we have.

She knows where the filters are, knows the grinder jams if you push too many beans through at once. She learned the kitchen like she learns everything, by watching without asking, storing information without advertising that she's collecting it.

The lodge settles around us. The timber groans in the cold, a low complaint that I've been hearing since I was old enough to listen. This building talks. It tells you where the weight sits, where the cold gets in, where the years have loosened the joints between log and frame.

My father built it to last. It has lasted. The fact that it survived him is justice enough.

Kendall moves through the kitchen with the borrowed confidence of a woman who has made a temporary space her own without meaning to. The flannel she's wearing is the same one I unbuttoned against my bedroom door last night. Seeing it on her body in the morning light tightens something in my throat I wasn't expecting.

"Bryan's at the overlook," I say when the coffee is poured. "Cameron and Dash are on the road."

"That's an early start."

"They have things to check."

She wraps both hands around her mug. The steam rises between us. She's reading me over the rim with the trained attention of a woman who learned to decode men's moods as a survival skill. I let her look. I have nothing to hide this morning except the thing I'm about to stop hiding.

"You look like you didn't sleep," she says.

"I slept fine."

"Liar." The word is light, almost teasing, but the assessment behind it is clinical. She clocked the circles under my eyes before her first sip. "You were awake when I woke up. You were awake when I fell asleep. At some point between those two things, a person usually closes their eyes."

"I had things to think about."

"Must have been serious. You have a line between your eyebrows that wasn't there yesterday."

She reaches across the counter and touches it. One finger, quick, matter-of-fact. The touch is casual. The effect of it is not.

"You're doing it again," she says.

"Doing what?"

"Looking at me like you're about to say something that changes the room."

She's right. She's always right about the looking. Living with a man like Gary Simmons taught her to read the weather in a room before the storm hits. That skill is pointed at me now across the kitchen counter.

"Kendall." I set my mug down. "I found something you need to know."

The mug stops halfway to her mouth. Her hands go still, the controlled stillness of someone who has been called into rooms before by men with bad news, and the stillness is its own kind of armor.

"Go ahead," she says.

"I found a missing persons report. It was filed out of Anchorage. The reporting party is a man named Gary Simmons."

The name hits her the way a round hits a target. The impact is visible in her hands, her jaw, the place between her shoulders where the tension snaps tight. The mug goes down with a click that sounds louder than it should in the quiet kitchen.

"Nothing I need to worry about," she says, flat and precise. She's quoting me from yesterday morning, and the words sound different coming back.

"I lied," I say. "You need to worry about it."

She waits. The stillness is its own demand.

"I found it on a missing persons clearinghouse over the satellite connection. Your description matched, and the photo confirmed it."