Page 31 of Faultline

She's not wrong. She's deciding whether to let me take it back.

I don't take it back.

"We need to get this to Rhys," she says. The professional steadiness is back in her voice, the edges smoothed into the competence that lets her sit across from women in crisis and hold the room still. "The shell company connections, the corridor, the registered agent linking the land purchases to the recruitment operation. Rhys can put this in front of the state troopers, and I can get it to Aurora Covenant's legal team in Anchorage."

"How fast can they move?"

"The legal team? Weeks. Maybe longer. Federal attention requires documented pattern, and we've got pattern, but pattern isn't evidence until a prosecutor says it is."

"And Cascade's timeline?"

She looks at the topo sheet. At the strip of purchased land broken only by Stoddard ground that won't sell.

"Faster than ours," she says.

I fold the map and set it on the shelf. The parcel numbers go into my father's notebook alongside the board feet and replanting schedules.

LLC names and registration dates share the margins now with generations of timber data, and the book that started as a record of what my family built has become a record of what someone is trying to take.

The afternoon light is fading early, late September stealing the sun behind the western ridge and pulling the temperature with it. I feed the woodstove and close the damper halfway.

Tosh is on the landline with Aurora Covenant's Anchorage office, her voice carrying the crisp urgency of someone who has made this kind of call before and knows exactly how many words it takes to get a lawyer's attention.

She carries the phone to the window and stands facing the tree line, talking about corporate registrations and Whitfield-Crane. The last of the daylight turns the spruce into silhouettes against a sky going from gold to gray.

I watch her the way I watch the forest. Patient. Reading what the surface shows and what it doesn't.

She's too good at this. The skill runs deeper than training. It has the muscle memory of someone who learned the mechanics of disappearance from somewhere closer than a textbook. The fury underneath her professionalism belongs to a woman who knows what it costs to be the person nobody looks for.

She hangs up and turns from the window. Full dark outside now, nothing beyond the pane.

"They'll open a file," she says. "A lawyer reviews the filings, makes a recommendation." Her mouth flattens. "Weeks."

She says it like weather. Like something you report, not something you argue with.

I cross the kitchen and stand beside her at the window. Cold radiates off the pane.

"You know what it looks like," I say. "When someone disappears and nobody comes looking."

Her reflection in the glass holds steady. Chin level. Eyes fixed on something past the tree line that I can't see.

"I know what it feels like," she says. "There's a difference."

She doesn't elaborate. I don't push.

The cabin tightens around us the way it does when the light goes. Walls pulling closer. The space between the woodstove and the counter shrinks until two people standing a foot apart might as well be touching.

Her hand finds the counter behind her and grips. My hand is on the window frame. Less than a foot of cold air between her knuckles and mine, and every inch is a decision I'm making with a jaw clenched tight enough to ache.

I want to touch her. The wanting is loud enough to drown out the investigation, the LLCs, the topo sheet still spread across the table behind us. I don't move.

Tomorrow I'll walk the corridor with Rhys while Tosh sends the shell company data to Aurora Covenant's lawyers. The map in my father's notebook will become evidence in a fight he never knew was coming.

Tonight the cabin is too small. The woman beside me fills every corner of it, and the restraint I'm holding costs me more with each minute that passes.

My hands stay where they are. The corridor needs Rhys. The women on her list need time we keep running out of.

Dark settles over the ridge. The kitchen window goes black, and our reflections stare back at us, side by side in a cabin on a mountain that someone is trying hard to take.