Page 19 of Faultline

The cabin sits in a clearing surrounded by spruce and birch, and when I step out of my car, the silence is so complete that my ears ring with it.

Inside, the cabin is older and warmer than I expected. The furniture has been here for generations — a sofa with cushions recovered at least once, a braided rug worn thin at the center in front of the woodstove, curtains chosen by a woman who liked the way light came through them. Everything is clean and maintained with the kind of care that says someone is keeping this place alive, not just living in it. The kitchen is small, organized, every tool in its place. A table that could seat four takes up the space between the kitchen and the front window, and the surface is scarred with years of use.

Liam carries my bag to the guest room. He sets it inside the door, steps back, and waits in the hall while I take in the space.

The room is smaller than the rest of the cabin but the same hand furnished it. A double bed with a hand-stitched quilt in muted blues and greens. A pine dresser with brass drawer pulls polished by decades of use. Linen curtains that will let the morning light through. The window faces the tree line.

"Bathroom's at the end of the hall," he says. "Woodstove keeps the whole cabin warm. If you need anything, I'm across the hall."

Across the hall. The information lands in a place it shouldn't. "Thank you."

He nods and pulls the door partway closed. I listen to his footsteps move down the hall, heavy enough to feel through the floorboards but placed with the care of someone who has practiced silence until it became instinct.

I unpack what I brought. The backup drive and my personal laptop go on the nightstand beside a change of clothes. The go-bag I've kept packed since my twenties, the one with cash, a prepaid phone, and copies of every document that matters. I set it on the nightstand where I can reach it in the dark.

Then I sit on the edge of the bed, press my palms flat on my knees, and breathe.

The break-in wasn't random. The break-in was a message sent by people who have the resources to defeat a deadbolt without leaving marks and the patience to search an office file by file and put everything back. People who wanted me to know they could reach me. People who are now, presumably, aware that I've moved.

I wash my face in the bathroom and come out to find Liam at the kitchen table with two mugs of coffee. He pushes one toward the empty chair without looking up from the map spread in front of him. I sit.

The coffee is black and strong, the way someone who lives alone makes it when he's never had to consider someone else's preferences. It's the way I take mine. I don't mention the coincidence.

We work in silence for an hour. He studies his map. I review the backup files on my laptop. Every few minutes, his gaze lifts from the map to the kitchen window and tracks the tree line beyond the glass. He scans the dark with the steady patience of a man who trusts the mountain to warn him before anyone else does.

The woodstove ticks and settles. Outside, the last of the daylight drops behind the ridge, and the windows go dark by degrees until the cabin is the only lit space in a world of black spruce and cold air.

I catch him watching me once. He doesn't look away. The steadiness of it sends a current down my spine that has nothing to do with the work in front of me.

"You should eat," he says.

"So should you."

He makes soup from a can and heats bread in the oven, and we eat at the table with the files pushed to one side.

The domesticity of it feels dangerous, something I can't name. Sharing a meal in a cabin on a mountain with a man I met this afternoon shouldn't feel like something my body has been waiting for. But my body has its own accounting system. Right now the ledger says I haven't been touched by anyone in longer than I want to calculate. The man across the table has hands that look like they'd know exactly what to do with me.

I go to the guest room when the fire burns low. I don't sleep.

The cabin settles around me in layers of sound. The woodstove. The wind in the spruce. The creak of floorboards that says Liam is still awake, still moving, still checking locks and windows the way a man checks them when he's trained to expect what comes through them.

Somewhere past the point where stubbornness becomes dishonesty, I give up. I pull on the thermal I packed and walk barefoot into the hall.

The kitchen light is off. The woodstove throws orange light across the floor, and Liam is sitting at the table in the dark, his hands wrapped around a mug that looks like the contents have long since gone cold.

He looks up. The firelight catches the lines of his face, the jaw, the scar tissue on his knuckles, the way his eyes hold mine without flinching.

"Can't sleep," I say.

"Neither can I."

I should go back to the guest room. I should maintain the professional distance that makes this arrangement defensible as a tactical decision rather than the slow-motion collision it's been since the café window. I should do the smart thing.

I've spent my entire adult life telling other women that decisions made in crisis are still decisions. That what you do when you're scared and exhausted and operating on the ragged end of your reserves is the truest version of yourself, and you have to own it in the morning.

I'm standing in a dark hallway in a cabin that belongs to a man I've known for less than a day, and every cell in my body is pulling me toward the firelight at the end of the hall. This isn't adrenaline. The adrenaline burned off hours ago. This is the thing underneath it, the thing I've been refusing to name since I saw him through the café glass, the thing that tightened low in my stomach when he said "That's not what I asked" and looked at me like the answer mattered more than the question.

I could go back to the guest room. Close the door. Lie in the dark until dawn. In the morning I'd have my discipline intact, my professionalism untouched, and nothing else.