Page 8 of Claimed on the Ridge

Her bag sits on the floor beside her chair, and her left hand drifts to it between bites, fingers brushing the strap the way another person might touch a talisman.

When I move to refill my coffee, her eyes drop to my hands and track them from the mug to the pot and back. The tracking is automatic, a reflex built by spending time in rooms where hands were the thing to watch.

Her gaze cuts away. Too fast.

Cameron reaches behind her for the salt and a pan slides off the stack on the counter.

The sound is sharp and metallic and not loud, and Kendall's whole body goes rigid.

The flinch is total. Shoulders up, chin down, left hand off the table and against her right wrist in a gesture so fast and so practiced that her fingers are wrapped around the wrist before the pan finishes clattering.

Her breath catches, a single truncated inhale that she cuts off and converts into a controlled exhale in under two seconds.

Cameron freezes. He looks at the pan on the floor, then at her. The expression on his face is pure confusion, a man whohas never in his adult life made a woman flinch and doesn't understand the mechanics of it.

"Sorry about that," he says, bending to pick it up. The gentleness in his voice is Cameron's default setting and therefore exactly the right thing and exactly the wrong thing simultaneously.

"My fault," Kendall says. The recovery is fast and smooth and would fool most people.

The hand comes off the wrist. The shoulders drop. The smile she produces is small and appropriate and doesn't reach her eyes. "Jumpy morning."

Dash watches from the counter. His mug is halfway to his mouth and his eyes move from Kendall to me and stay.

The flinch is one I know. That combination of sound and physical response, that hand going to that wrist, that smile. I've seen it before. Different face, different kitchen, same bones.

My mother used to flinch at the sound of my father's boots on the porch. The recovery, the smile that followed, was a performance so polished that by the end she could execute it while setting the table and carrying on a conversation about what the boys needed for school.

The thought surfaces and I let it sit this time, because drowning it would be a lie. The gesture, the hand to the wrist, looked like covering. Protecting something. The motion was too fast to be conscious, the kind of thing a body learns to do before the mind gives permission.

I eat. The food tastes like nothing.

Most guests leave their plate on the table and say thank you. She washes hers, dries it, puts it back in the rack, and wipes down the counter like she’s trying to erase ever having been here.

After breakfast, the lodge settles into the rhythm of a building under siege by weather. Cameron disappears to check the generator housing.

Dash finds a book and a spot by the fire that he'll occupy until restlessness drives him somewhere else, which won't take long.

Kendall claims a chair by the fire and stays in it. She doesn't read. She doesn't ask for anything.

She sits with her hands around a mug that has gone cold and watches the flames, and the stillness in her isn't peaceful. She's conserving energy because she doesn't know when she'll need to spend it.

I find the excuse of restocking the bar to remain in the same space without appearing to have chosen it. The truth is simpler and more uncomfortable than that. She's in my lodge and I don't yet understand what she's running from, and until I do, the distance between us will remain whatever I decide it is.

At some point she moves to the frosted window, arms crossed, looking at the white nothing beyond it. Her jaw is set, the tension in it belonging to a woman recalculating a plan that weather just dismantled.

"How long have you been out here?" she asks without turning around.

"In the lodge, or in Sawyer's Ridge?"

"Either. Both."

"Whole life, more or less. Took over the lodge when I was eighteen."

She turns from the window, and the question in her face is genuine rather than conversational. "That's young to run a place like this."

"My father died. Someone had to."

The words come out flat and factual, because they are flat and factual, and also because the longer version of that story involves a man who drank his liver into failure after his wife diedon an icy road and his daughter went to live with her aunt, and the longer version isn't information Kendall Jackson has earned. The short version will do. She's good at short versions. She'll understand.