Chapter 2: The Silver Chain

I stood in that doorway for a full minute, staring down a driveway with nothing on it but frost.

No car. No headlights. No footsteps in the gravel. Just the wind coming off the ridge and my heart slamming into my ribs.

It's Dot, I told myself. Den's mom left a welcome gift. Normal. Boring. Normal.

I took the box upstairs and opened it under the lamp.

A bracelet. Thin silver chain, tiny star charm. Cheap enough to be sweet, pretty enough to matter. A folded slip of paper slid out with it — I saw it flutter toward the nightstand and I didn't chase it, because I was already turning the chain in the light, already choosing the easy story.

A welcome gift. From the lodge.

I fell asleep with it in my palm.

I did not see the note slide down behind the nightstand and disappear under the bed.

I woke at six, because I always wake at six, and because I learned young that the fastest way to make people keep you is to be useful.

By seven-thirty I'd cleared four days of dishes, scoured a stove that had seen things, and made enough eggs, bacon and cinnamon French toast to feed a small army.

A small army arrived.

Kel stopped dead in the doorway. "Am I dreaming? Tuck, hit me."

Tuck hit him.

Aiden actually got emotional. "There's a table. I forgot we had a table."

Den ate standing up, which I learned was his permanent condition. "Motion to make Ivy a structural component of this building. All in favor?"

"Aye," said four voices.

And then Wren came down in her mismatched socks, climbed onto a chair, and ate three whole pieces of French toast.

The room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with me.

"She doesn't eat breakfast," Aiden said under his breath. "She hasn't eaten breakfast in a year and a half."

Cade came in last, hair wet, sleeves shoved up his forearms. He looked at his daughter's empty plate. He looked at me. Something moved across his face like weather.

Then he took a mug and drank his coffee at the counter with his back half-turned, and I told myself I didn't care.

"So what did you do before this?" Kel asked. "Down in the flatlands."

"Emergency room nurse," I said. "Level One trauma. Six years."

Forks stopped.

Den put his down. "Say that again slowly and let me feel small."

"I know how to hold a spine. I know how to run a code. I've packed a chest wound in a hallway with a security guard sitting on the patient's legs."

Behind me, a chair scraped. Cade set his mug in the sink and walked out without a word.

Kel leaned over. "Don't take it personally. He was a combat medic. Eight years. He'd rather eat glass than talk about it."

"He'd rather eat glass than talk about anything."

"Now you're getting it."

The honeymoon lasted eleven hours.

At three in the morning the great room was still going — a poker game, a speaker, Tuck losing his mind about a bad hand. I had a shift shadowing at the county clinic at eight.

I came out in a robe with murder in my eyes. "It is three a.m."

"Exactly," Den said. "The night is young."

"I have to be at the clinic at eight."

"Then you're already losing."

I was drawing breath to end him when a hand reached past me and pulled the power strip out of the wall.

Everything died at once. Music gone. Lights down.

Cade stood there holding the cord.

"Training run's at five," he said. "She's at the clinic at eight. Wren's asleep upstairs. Go to bed."

Then, quietly, to me, on his way past: "You can't live with these people."

Something warm cracked open in my chest, and I hated it.

Later I couldn't sleep, so I sat on the porch steps in the cold. He came out with two mugs and handed me one without asking. Hot chocolate. Way too much sugar.

We didn't talk. We just sat there with the whole black mountain breathing in front of us, and somehow that was the least lonely I'd felt in two years.

From the kitchen window, Den watched us and slowly, silently, mouthed oh no.

I went up at two, grinning like a fool, twisting the silver chain on my wrist.

My phone lit up on the pillow.

Unknown number.