Page 48 of Claimed on the Ridge

The possessive distinction in that should alarm me. It doesn't. It heats me from the inside, immediate and inappropriate, and I don't turn away from it.

"I want to call her," I say. "She examined my ribs. She kept my confidence. She should hear my real name from me."

He nods once.

I step back from the desk. The page stays open on the laptop, the gala photo loading and reloading in the slow, banded rhythm of a satellite connection.

"I want a copy of everything you have on him," I say from the doorway.

"You'll have it."

I walk out of his office with nothing in my hands and less on my shoulders than I've carried in years. The truth is out. He didn't flinch from it, and he didn't use it.

The lodge is still in the late morning. The fire has burned down to embers in the stone hearth. Light through the windows is thin and bright, the quality of a sky that's been cleared by wind for the first time in days. The snow on the ridge catches it andthrows it back, and the main room glows with the reflected white of a landscape I'm only now seeing clearly.

I sit in the chair by the fire and press my palms flat against my thighs. My hands are trembling. The tremor is fine, living in the tendons rather than the muscles. The adrenaline from the morning is draining out of me in slow waves. Everything from the kitchen and the office is fading with it. What's left behind doesn't feel like relief. It feels like the absence of a weight I've been carrying so long that my muscles don't remember neutral.

My mother was Jackson before she was Mitchell. She took my father's name and kept it through the divorce, through the years of scraping by in Sitka on waitress tips and stubbornness. I took her maiden name as a shield. I gave Alex the one I was born with as surrender.

He said it in the kitchen.'Kendall Mitchell.'He put force behind it, the force of a man marking ground he planned to hold.

Gary said my name the way you'd say the name of a thing you're inventorying, with bored certainty that it would be where he left it. Four years of hearing my name in his mouth taught me to brace for whatever followed, because what followed was never good.

Alex says my name the way you'd say the name of a place you intend to return to. The difference closes around me like a fist. I grip my knees until the tremor runs through my fingers and out.

His hands were in my hair last night. I can still feel the fist at the roots, the pull that tilted my head back, holding me exactly where he wanted me. The memory arrives uninvited and drops low in my belly. The timing is absurd, sitting in a chair by a dying fire with a missing persons report fresh in my head. The heat doesn't care about timing.

Alex moves through the lodge on his usual circuit, checking doors and restocking wood, a building and the people inside it. He carries a log in each hand, his stride unchanged by theweight, and the sight of it hits the lower part of my brain in a place that has nothing to do with firewood.

He passes through the main room twice. The first time he adds the logs to the fire, eyes on the hearth. The second time he stops at the end of the bar and looks.

The looking is different now. When I was still hiding behind a borrowed name, he watched me with measuring attention, deciding how long to let me hide. The measurement is gone. What replaced it is more direct, stripped of the distance he maintained when the lie sat between us.

"You need to eat something else," he says.

"I ate your eggs."

"That was hours ago."

"Are you going to monitor my meals now?"

"If you make me."

The words are low and absolute, and the possessive weight behind them should set off every alarm I own. It doesn't. What it does instead is sink into the same low place where his hand pressed against me last night, territorial and specific.

A man telling me when to eat is making me feel safe rather than caged, and I'm choosing not to examine that while my hands are still shaking.

"I'll eat when my stomach unclenches," I say.

His jaw shifts. He decides I mean it and moves on. The next thing out of his mouth will be tactical, not tender, and the certainty of that is more comfort than kindness would be.

Bryan returns from the overlook in the early afternoon. His boots hit the porch steps with an even cadence, unhurried and measured. I hear him come through the mudroom. He walks into the main room a moment later, coat off, gloves tucked in his back pocket.

He sees me at the table. His look holds for a beat, flat and taking stock.

"Road's clear to the second switchback," he says to Alex. "No tracks. No traffic. The pass is open. Dicey, but open. Nobody's used it yet."

"Good," Alex says.