Page 24 of Faultline

The drive back up the mountain is quiet. Tosh watches the tree line through the passenger window, her eyes tracking shadows between the trunks. She's learning to read it the same as I do, unprompted, and her instincts are sharper than most people who've lived here their whole lives.

At the cabin, I park the truck and sit for a moment with the engine off. The clearing. The porch. The chimney trailing smoke into the cold air.

Same proportions, same timber, same placement in the spot where my grandfather decided the light was right and the drainage was sound.

Today it looks different. The difference is the mug on the windowsill, visible through the kitchen glass. The second mug, the blue one she claimed from the shelf, set down and abandoned while its owner's attention moved on to more urgent work.

Her car parked beside my truck. Her laptop on my table. Her marks on my skin where her nails dug into my shoulders, still there under my flannel.

One night. She's been in this cabin one night, and the place already has her fingerprints on it.

"I want to walk the full property boundary tomorrow," I say. "The eastern fence is compromised, and if they're cutting wire on that section, I need to check the others. The northern boundary runs through old growth where visibility drops to ten feet."

Tosh looks at me. "You want company, or are you asking me to stay behind where it's safe?"

The edge in the question is deliberate. She's drawing a line before I can draw one for her.

"I want you to see what I've been finding out there. Your investigation and mine are looking at the same people from different angles. It's time we looked at the same ground."

"Good answer." The nod she gives carries the particular finality of someone who would have come regardless of what I said. "First light?"

"Earlier. Bring boots that can handle deadfall."

"I own boots that have handled worse than deadfall." She turns back to her laptop. The conversation is over because she decided it's over, and the fact that she's the one ending exchanges in my cabin should bother me more than it does.

I rebuild the fire while she sets up at the table again.

Her files are spread in a pattern that has a logic I haven't learned to read yet, timelines and names and corporate registrations telling a story I'm only hearing half of.

The half I'm hearing is enough to know that the people cutting my fence wire and the people relocating her clients are working on the same calendar, toward the same end. The gap in the eastern boundary is the next step in a progression that started with survey stakes in a cemetery and hasn't finished escalating.

The afternoon settles in. She works. I sharpen the chainsaw in the mudroom. I inventory the fencing supplies. I do the things that keep the property maintained against the steady pressure of weather, wildlife, and now whatever Cascade is sending up the mountain at night.

The cabin wasn't built for casual company, and it shows. She passes behind me to refill her coffee and brushes against my back, and the contact sends a jolt through my spine that makes my hand tighten on the wrench I'm holding. Neither of us mentions it. The not mentioning takes effort that could power the woodstove.

Her coffee on the windowsill is still there at four o'clock. I don't move it. The ring it's leaving on the pine will be there long after the mug is washed, and the part of me that should object to a stain on wood my grandfather cut by hand is quiet. The part of me that wants every surface in this cabin marked by her is not.

Outside the kitchen window, the spruce are doing what they've always done. Growing. In no hurry to explain themselves to anyone.

8

TOSH

The alarm on my phone goes off at four-thirty, and I'm already awake. I've been awake since the cabin went dark. The only sounds were the woodstove settling and Liam's breathing across the hall, steady and deep with the rhythm of a man who sleeps the way he does everything else: deliberately, completely, without wasting effort on anything that doesn't serve the objective.

I dress in the dark. Thermals, layers, the boots I brought from Palmer that have logged more miles on rough terrain than most people accumulate in a lifetime. The laces pull tight over wool socks, and I sit on the edge of the guest bed and listen to the silence do its work.

The cabin holds me differently than it did two nights ago. That first night, the silence felt like someone else's private language I was overhearing. Now it feels like a room I've been given a key to. I'm not sure I should have accepted it, but the key is already in my pocket.

The kitchen light is on when I come down the hall. Liam is at the counter, two mugs of coffee already poured, dressed in layers that make his shoulders look like a structural engineering problem.

He hands me a mug without speaking. The coffee is hot and black and strong enough to make my molars ache. I drink half of it standing at the counter while he checks something on his phone, his face lit blue in the predawn dark.

"The fence line first," he says. "Then north along the boundary through the old growth. Full circuit."

"How long?"

"Most of the morning."