Page 19 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

Her silence fills the cabin.

"Your mom wrote you a letter," she says. Carefully.

"She writes one every month. I answer about every third one, which makes me a terrible son. She sends care packages with chamomile tea and homemade jam and socks she knits herself that are always two sizes too small because she refuses to believe her son wears a size thirteen boot."

"Size thirteen."

"The boots are in the corner if you want to verify."

"I believe you. They look like small boats."

I'm smiling. I can feel it on my face.

The conversation drifts. She asks about the mountains and I tell her about winter above the tree line, about the way sound carries in extreme cold, about the morning I saw a mountain lion on the ridge and we watched each other for three full minutes without moving. She asks about the military and I give her the outline. Enlisted at eighteen. Selection at twenty. Helmand, Kandahar. She doesn't push when I stop.

Then she says, "Can I tell you something I've never told anyone?"

The room changes.

"Yeah."

She looks at her hands in her lap, fingers laced tight.

"I want to own a greenhouse." She says it fast. "Not a big one. Not a commercial operation. A small one, with a workshop attached, where I could grow things and sell them. Herbs, mostly. Culinary herbs, medicinal herbs. Maybe seedlings in the spring. I've been reading about it for years. I have notebooks full of layouts and planting schedules and species lists. I had notebooks. They're in the apartment. If the apartment is still there."

She hasn't looked up. Her thumbs move against each other in small circles. She's handed me the most private thing she owns. The dream she never said out loud because saying it out loud makes it real and real things can be taken away.

"My mother grew herbs," I say. It comes out of a drawer I forgot I had. "She had a garden behind the house. Basil, thyme, rosemary, mint. The rosemary bush was so old it had turned into a small tree. She used to cut sprigs and put them in mason jars on every windowsill. The whole house smelled like rosemary. I grew some on the sill here last summer. It didn't survive the frost, but for about four months the cabin smelled like her kitchen."

Zoe looks up. Her eyes are full.

"Rosemary is perennial," she says. Her voice is thick but steady. "It shouldn't have died. Did you keep it near the window?"

"On the sill."

"That's the problem. The glass gets too cold at night and the root system freezes even if the room is warm. You need to move it back from the window by about eight inches and put a layer of perlite in the bottom of the pot for insulation. The plant doesn't know it's inside. It only knows the temperature at the root line." She says it with quiet authority. The shift from vulnerability to competence happens so naturally I don't think she notices. But I notice.

"You'd be good at it," I say. "You'd be really good at it, Zoe. The greenhouse. The herbs. All of it. You should do it."

Her face does something I haven't seen before. The look of a person who has been carrying something heavy for a very long time and has just been told that the heavy thing is not ridiculous.

"You mean that," she says.

"I don't say things I don't mean. Ask Mason. It's one of my least charming qualities."

She laughs, softly. And then she reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine. “Can I tell you something else?”

“Always,” I whisper.

She pauses briefly before saying, “I have a flash drive. I downloaded everything from Tyler’s computer. Honestly, I’m not even sure what I’ve found and if it can help. It mainly looked like financial records I couldn’t understand.”

I blow out a deep breath. “How?”

“I had to go to the bathroom. Tyler and another man were fighting. It all happened so fast.”

“Where’s the drive now?”

She pulls her hand back for a moment and reaches into the pocket of her jeans. She pulls out a small USB drive and slides it across the table toward me.