Page 55 of Claimed on the Ridge

His hand lands on my hip as he reaches. Brief, certain, gone. The touch isn't for show. It's orientation. I'm here, his hand says. Noted.

Dash watches the whole thing with the expression of someone waiting for confirmation of something he already knew. He points the fork at both of us.

"So that's happening."

"Eat your bacon," Alex says.

"I'm just saying. The walls in this lodge aren't that thick."

"The walls are fine. Your manners need work."

Dash grins wider and turns back to the stove. The exchange is easy, practiced. These are brothers who have been having the same argument in different forms since childhood.

Alex pulls out a chair and sits. Then he pulls out the one beside him. Not across from him. Beside him. The placement is a decision, not a courtesy.

Gary held doors, pulled chairs, placed his hand on the small of my back in public with the precision of a man arranging props. Alex pulls out a chair because he wants me next to him, and the difference between arrangement and want is the thing I keep tripping over.

I sit beside him. Dash puts bacon on heavy stoneware and sets it between us.

"Cameron left early," Dash says. "Something about the road."

Alex nods. He doesn't elaborate.

I notice the non-elaboration. The way his jaw shifts a fraction when Dash mentions the road. The way his eyes stay on his mug instead of finding mine. Whatever Cameron is doing on the road, Alex knows about it, and the knowing is a weight he's choosing not to share with me over breakfast.

I store it. The habit is instinct. Years of reading the gap between what a man says and what a man means have made me fluent in a language I wish I didn't speak.

"Storm's broken," Dash says through a mouthful of bacon. He gestures toward the window with his fork. "Look."

I look. He's right. The sky that has been pressing down on the ridge for days has cracked along the horizon. Pale blue shows through the grey, thin as a scar, and the light it throws across the snow is sharper, brighter. The kind of light that means the temperature is dropping and the clouds are lifting and the world outside this lodge is about to open up.

The pass, the road, the distance between this kitchen and Anchorage, all of it shrinking with every degree of the rising temperature.

"Bryan said the pass cleared enough yesterday for a truck to get through if the driver knew what he was doing," Dash adds. "Give it another day of this and it'll be clean."

Alex drinks his coffee. The silence after Dash's words is measured, and I can feel him choosing what to put in it.

"Pass has been open," Alex says. "Just not friendly."

"Well, it's about to get friendly." Dash looks between us. Reads the room with a sharpness that doesn't match the easy grin. "That's a good thing, right?"

"That's a thing," I say.

Alex looks at me over his mug. The look lasts a breath, maybe two, and contains more information than most men communicate in an hour.

The question he's not asking is loud enough to hear. So is the answer I'm not giving. The space between them is full of a missing persons report and a man in Anchorage with resources and a road that's opening whether we want it to or not.

"More bacon?" Dash asks. The question breaks the look, and I wonder if he did it on purpose.

The morning moves the way mornings move now. Alex disappears into his office after breakfast. I hear him on the satellite phone, his voice pitched low enough that the words don't carry. The tone does. It's the clipped cadence of a man giving instructions, not making conversation.

I hear Bryan come through the mudroom. His coat hits the hook, his boots cross the kitchen floor. He pours coffee, exchanges a few words with Alex through the office door, and leaves again without sitting down.

The coffee is a prop. He came for the conversation, and the conversation lasted less time than it took him to cross the kitchen. Whatever Alex told him, it was short because it was specific.

Cameron's truck passes the window headed downhill. An hour later it passes again, climbing back up. He comes inside to refill his thermos. Alex is leaning against the counter next to me, his hand resting on the small of my back while I pour a second cup of coffee. Cameron glances at the two of us, screws the cap on, and says, "Road's clear to the bridge. Getting soft past that."

Cameron treats the contact between us like a weather report. He delivers his update and walks out without a second glance. The normalcy of it eases a tension in me that Dash's teasing stirred up.