Page 51 of Forbidden Protector

"I got a passport." He says it the way other kids say I lost a tooth. "You need one to go to Canada, and I had to get my picture taken and I wasn't allowed to smile in it, which is so dumb, because who doesn't smile in pictures."

"Nobody in a passport photo," Mackenzie says. "It's a federal rule. I'd know."

"That's so dumb." He twists around to look at her properly, fully awake now, all elbows. "We've been skiing Bridger Bowl like every weekend since Thanksgiving. Every single weekend. Dad says I ski better than him now but I don't think that's actually true, he just says it."

"It's getting true," John says, from the step.

"And now we're going to Lake Louise, which is in Canada, which is why I needed the passport, and it's supposed to have way more snow than Bridger and way bigger mountains and Dad says there's a run there that's black diamond the whole way down, like the whole thing, not just some of it."

"Sounds like Aiden's going to have some competition."

Aiden is Miles's best friend. The two of them were practically raised on the same chairlift most winters, which is exactly why the kid's arm is the day's top story. "He still skiing with you most weekends, or is the cast slowing him down?"

"Aiden broke his arm on a trampoline." Miles delivers this with the flat, devastating contempt of a kid who has never once fallen off anything that mattered. "A trampoline, Uncle Holt. I've never broken anything and I ski black diamonds."

"Aiden sounds like a liability," I notice.

"Aiden's eight," John explains, tipping the bottle at me. "They're all liabilities. This one included, long as we're being honest."

"I'm a good liability," Miles adds, with total confidence, then pivots without warning. "The hotel's got an outdoor pool that's heated, so you can swim in the snow. Mac, have you ever swum in the snow? Steam comes off the water and your hair gets icicles but you're not even cold."

"Can't say I have."

He's already off the step, done sitting still now that he's fully awake, and drops to his knees in the yard where Gus is waiting for exactly this. "Gus. Watch this." He produces a stick from somewhere and winds up like he's about to break a world record.

He overthrows it two feet in front of himself and John shakes his head into his beer.

Mackenzie's got her knees pulled up in the porch chair now, both hands around a mug she's forgotten about, watching Miles fail spectacularly at the stick throw. Her whole face goes soft, unguarded, and I can't stop looking at it.

I've only seen her this loose once before, up on the mare with her hair coming out of its knot and the timber going by. I remember standing at that fence rail watching her move with the horse, thinking things about being underneath her I had no business thinking at the time.

She's got that same ease on her now, easy at my house and with my best friend's kid, and I don't ask about the look.

"You're good with him," she says, quieter now, just for me.

"He's easy to be good with."

John catches the tail end of it and grins into the bottle. "She's sharp. You said that already, or did you skip the part where you tell people things about the woman you're⁠—"

"John."

"Right. Professional arrangement." He holds my eyes a beat too long over the top of his beer, one corner of his mouth climbing. It’s the look of a man who's already decided what he thinks and isn't going to say it out loud twice.

Mackenzie doesn't correct him and neither do I. The silence says more than either of us has managed out loud in over a week.

John looks between the two of us and gets a grin on his face I'd like to remove with my hands.

"Tell her the thing," he says instead. "The six-hour thing."

"No."

"C'mon. She already knows you talk. Might as well know why it's rationed."

I don't tell her the thing. Some doors I keep shut on purpose, and that one's got a whole country behind it I don't open for anybody, not even her, not tonight.

John reads that off me in about a second and a half, same as he's read everything off me since we were twenty-two and freezing in the same hole. He lets it go without making me say so.

That's the whole gift of him. He asks once and then he stops.