by Megan Crane
First there’d been her apartment to deal with, which was never going to rank at the top of any list of happy activities. It had been a long, depressing week of sorting through the damage and saving what she could. There were memories that were lost forever and a few items of personal significance that could never be replaced. But the truth was that Everly had lost nothing that she couldn’t live without.
From her apartment, anyway.
It was an interesting thing to know as a fact instead of a philosophical exercise. Missing something wasn’t the same as being wrecked without it. And as much as she still felt violated and still dreamed of flames crackling up the walls, she wasn’t wrecked.
The things in her apartment had just been things.
Rebecca was the only loss that mattered. She was the only thing that really couldn’t be replaced. And the only thing Everly could give the roommate she should have been a better friend to was justice.
She worked with the police. She told them about Annabeth’s “friend,” and felt vindicated when the father who hadn’t wanted to recognize his own daughter while Rebecca was alive found himself embroiled in the scandal of her death.
She was sure that a man like Rebecca’s father, a well-known lawyer with local political aspirations, would have sharks for attorneys who would keep him out of the prison Annabeth was going to. But the scandal would hurt him. His “frail and needy” wife announced her intention to file for divorce. His children denounced him.
That wasn’t happiness, of course. But it was certainly satisfying.
Once her apartment had been taken care of, she spent a lot of her time explaining herself to all the friends she’d ignored over the past month. And her older brother, Jason, who hadn’t been too pleased that she’d stopped answering his calls and resorted to texts with precious few words. She’d lost a lot of things when that bomb had gone off, it was true. And she’d learned that she could live without most of them. The people she loved, on the other hand, she treasured and had treated badly.
There were a lot of tears. A lot of apologies on Everly’s part.
And a lot of opportunity to ask herself the same question her friends and family did: Why hadn’t she called? Why hadn’t she asked for help?
Why did she think she had to go through something like that all alone?
Charles had continued to reach out to her, and some three weeks after she’d quit, Everly walked back to her old office and sat down with her former boss. He’d told her they didn’t want to lose her expertise.
And Everly had told him that she had no interest in returning to the office but would be happy to work remotely, doing more of the creative work she enjoyed and less of the things she hated, like the interoffice politics.
To her surprise, Charles had agreed to let her work freelance.
Enthusiastically agreed, in fact.
And she’d had to wonder why it had taken losing everything to make her understand that if she never asked for what she wanted, that was exactly what she’d get.
That was why she’d come back to Grizzly Harbor. And not in panicked desperation this time.
When the ferry docked at the pier, the villagers came out to meet it and help unload supplies. Afterward, she took her time walking up the hill, into the town proper, and finally to the Water’s Edge Café. The village was just how she’d left it, except the fog that clung to the mountains and wound through the streets didn’t look as if it would burn off today. The mountain up behind Grizzly Harbor was moodier than she remembered. She squinted up at it, solemn and forbidding even shrouded in clouds, and couldn’t believe she’d ever pointed a rental car in that direction and then driven over it.
It just went to show that when Everly really wanted something, she found a way to get it.
She was holding on to that.
She pushed her way into the restaurant and had the strangest sense that she . . . fit. Right there amid the bright walls with the cheerful pictures on them.
And she was unduly excited when Caradine looked up from her place on the stool at the counter and stared at her. Unsmiling.
But not actually scowling.
“Back again,” Caradine said. “We still don’t have a menu.”
Everly grinned, because for some reason, that surly couple of sentences felt like the biggest welcome she’d ever received.
“I want coffee,” she said. “And something to eat, whatever sounds good. Oh, and a place to stay, if you know of anything.”
Caradine eyed her from across the restaurant floor. There was no one else inside at this hour of the afternoon, not that Everly thought that a crowd would have altered Caradine’s behavior in any way.
“Tourist season is over, thank the Lord.”
“Good thing I’m not a tourist, then.”
“Is this the part where montage music plays?” Caradine asked after a moment. “And we, what? Braid each other’s hair and talk about boys? I’m going to pass on that.”
Everly grinned wider. “Coffee. Food. Maybe a place to sleep. Braiding hair is optional but actually pretty creepy, if you ask me.”
“I don’t do friends.”
“You know, I’m going to share something with you, Caradine.”
“Oh joy.”
Everly shrugged out of her coat, then sat down at the nearest table. “It’s not actually a surprise that you ‘don’t do friends.’ It’s something about how open you are, maybe. Your sunny personality.”
“And also I hate everyone.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t ask for a job. You can’t work here.”
“I have a job,” Everly assured her. “Also, I’d be a terrible waitress. Here, I mean. I waited tables in college one summer and was good at it, but that doesn’t really go with your whole . . . thing.”
“Are you here for Blue?” Caradine asked in the same mild tone, cutting through the conversation just like that. Skewering it, more like.
“I don’t know.” Everly settled back in her chair, thought about it, and shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”
Because a lot of that would depend on which Blue turned up. The one who couldn’t keep his hands off her? Or the one who’d left her without a word?
Caradine smirked. “I’ll take that as a yes. And I like it. You can stay in my spare room.” She slid off her stool and headed toward the kitchen. “But that doesn’t mean we’re friends.”
“Of course not,” Everly agreed.
But she was still smiling.
After she ate yet another perfect meal that she wouldn’t have known to ask for but was precisely what she wanted, she asked Caradine for her key. The other woman laughed.
“I pity anyone stupid enough to steal from me,” she said. “It’s not locked. Just go up the stairs.”
Caradine lived above the restaurant, in a cozy apartment with a woodstove and breathtaking views of the harbor from every window. Everly sat there for a long time, not sure if she was relieved or overwhelmed to find that Alaska was even more beautiful than she remembered it.
The kind of beautiful that wedged its way into her soul, making it hard to breathe.
She felt . . . expansive here. Chicago felt too close now, too confined. Even the lovely house she’d grown up in hadn’t suited her any longer. It felt like a pair of pants that was just a shade too tight, the button forever digging into her belly, the creases riding up every time she tried to move.
Grizzly Harbor felt wide. High. Endless in all directions.
She spent the rest of the afternoon wandering up and down what passed for streets, the haphazard lanes going this way and that. Funny boardwalks and buildings propped up on stilts, and the happy, defiantly bright colors everywhere, even more magical to her mind when the sky was gray. She poked around in the handful of shops, and even bought herself a couple of local craft items—the first t
hings she’d bought since almost everything she’d had incinerated.
There was a bite in the air that suggested the seasons turned quicker here, and might even turn right on top of her. She stopped to untie her wool midlayer shirt from around her waist, then tugged it on. When she pulled her head through, she looked up to find a man standing across from her in the narrow street.
He looked the way she would have imagined an ancient warrior might, if she’d spent her time imagining such things. She wanted to draw him, to see if she could capture his strong cheekbones and the particular brown hue of his skin. His black hair was thick and slightly too long, and looked as if he spent a lot of his time raking his hands through it. He also looked as if he had just come out of the woods, and yet somehow sweat from exertion didn’t in any way take away from his considerable, and overwhelming, male beauty.
“Hey, Templeton,” Everly said. Very politely, as if the last time she’d seen him hadn’t been when he’d transported her from a police station to her parents’ house. “It’s nice to see you again.”
He grinned, but the look in his dark eyes was intent. Focused. “You’re a long way from Chicago.”
“I am.”
“Grizzly Harbor is pretty cute. I guess you didn’t have much time to look around the last time you were here.”
“You know, I didn’t.” She smiled. “I heard there were great hot springs, right here in town.”
“There sure are.” She couldn’t tell what accent that was that mellowed out his voice, hinting of time spent in the South. She knew only that he could wield it at will. “Is that why you came back? To enjoy some Alaskan hot springs?”
“Why else?”
Templeton laughed. It was a big, brash laugh that suited a man as . . . extreme as he was. It also seemed to echo off the mountain.
“I hoped you were going to put a miserable bastard I know out of his misery, but hot springs are fine. Probably more pleasant, all things considered.” He nodded to her, which saved her having to pretend she didn’t know what he meant—or having to conceal the twist in her gut at the notion Blue was miserable. Or that she could do anything about it. “Enjoy your time here. There’s no other place quite like Grizzly Harbor.”
And Everly was all about happiness these days, so that was exactly what she did.
She found her way to the hot springs, which were natural pools carved out of the mountainside that the locals had built structures around. She assumed that meant they used them all winter. There were designated women’s hours, which meant that she could go in, take off her clothes, and slip into the smooth, silky water without worrying about a thing.
She sat and let the heat seep into her bones. She tipped her head back, shut her eyes, and listened to the silence all around her. Towering silence.
It made her feel whole.
More women trickled in. They nodded at Everly as they got in, and she nodded back, feeling like a local. Some of the women settled in and shut their eyes, too. Others carried on talking. Everly learned a great deal about a woman named Maria who’d moved here with her boyfriend but left him for a local fisherman sometime over the last winter. In what the ladies in the pools thought was a revenge play, the boyfriend and the fisherman’s wife had shacked up. And now both Maria and the fisherman’s wife were pregnant, and no one seemed to know whose was whose.
“There are timeline concerns, apparently,” one of the women said.
“Last I heard, they were going to build out that cabin and live together,” one of her friends said. “All together.”
“Can’t say I blame them,” another woman chimed in, snorting out a laugh. “I wish I had an extra husband and wife to help with my kids.”
And when Everly was overheated and satisfyingly wrinkled, she got out of the pool and dried herself off in the sauna next door. She tried to imagine the two couples she’d just heard about, and all their kids, packed together in one cabin out in a winter here, and couldn’t decide if she admired them for their optimism or thought they were fools. The women in the pool hadn’t seemed able to decide, either.
But that was true about anything, she thought as she pulled her clothes back on. Grand gestures were romantic when they worked. People only thought you were foolish if you failed.
She made her way outside again, where it was considerably colder. Partly because she’d gotten so warm, but also because the temperature had dropped. The sun was already starting to go down, which made something inside her leap up and spin, as if the sunset were a gift just for her.
Because the last time she’d been here, it hadn’t really gotten dark at all.
She liked it here. She could breathe here. Everly liked being on the edge of the world, thousands of miles away from everything, so she could think.
She liked how small it was, how close. So close that if she wanted, she could likely figure out not only who the women in the pools had been but who they were talking about, too. There was no doubt in her mind that if she asked Caradine, she’d get more of the story. That was why people found small towns claustrophobic, she supposed, but she liked it.
Because if something else ever happened to her, if she lived in a place like this, it would be hard for strangers to sneak around. Impossible, even.
She picked up her pace on the narrow trail that wound down from the pools and back into town, not wanting to get stuck in the woods in the dark. She rounded the last curve that took her right above the village, and then stopped short.
Because Blue was there.
He stood as solid as one of the trees, sunset turning him golden. His expression was set and his arms were folded, and her heart flipped over, then kicked. Hard.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
And it reminded her so much of that day earlier this summer when she’d come careening over the mountain to find him. Her feet were in the dirt again. She was even wearing the same shoes he found so silly. Unserious, impractical shoes, if she remembered it right.
He stood there like a sentry. One who wanted her gone.
And the thing was, Grizzly Harbor fit her. Everly felt as if she’d been searching for this place all her life, without even knowing that there’d been anything missing. She liked everything about it. From grumpy Caradine to the hot springs to the cold, watchful mountain above. She had no trouble seeing herself here.
But the man standing in front of her was home.
He was in her bones.
She could live without him. She had.
What she’d concluded was that she didn’t want to.
She opened her mouth to say hello.
“No,” he gritted out before she could say anything. “No greetings, like this is normal. No chitchat. No tourist nonsense up in the pools. You shouldn’t be here, Everly. You know you shouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t know that at all.”
“Listen,” he began. “Little—”
But Everly shook her head at that. She stepped closer to him and lifted her hand as if she was going to slap it over his mouth.
He grabbed it in midair, of course.
She didn’t let that stop her.
“Stop,” she said with a quiet force she could feel flooding out from somewhere deep inside her, as if she were a part of the vastness all around her. As if it were in her, too. “I’m not a little girl. You don’t think I’m a little girl—you just wish you did.”
He shook his head as if he wanted to argue. She didn’t let him.
“I told you I was in love with you, Blue. I meant it. Did you really think that if you snuck out in the middle of the night, I would forget?”
Twenty-three
Blue dropped her hand like it was on fire, but that did nothing to alleviate the burn. He could feel her touch everywhere, making him hard and hollow and even less happy than he’d been to begin with.
She was
here, and clearly had no particular plan to come find him.
She was here, for God’s sake.
According to Templeton, she’d been sauntering around Grizzly Harbor, unaware that he was tailing her for a good twenty minutes. She’d poked around the shops that stayed open, if only at random hours now that the summer crowds were gone. She’d taken some pictures with her phone. She’d looked, Templeton had been sure to tell him, as if she were just in town to look at the pretty views and then leave, like any other tourist.
“Great,” Blue had said, glaring down at his tablet as if he were really that entranced by the latest mission parameters they’d been debating in the lodge. “Then she’ll leave like a tourist, too. On the next ferry.”
No one had pointed out that today was Monday and the next ferry didn’t come until Friday. Everyone knew the freaking ferry schedule. Blue certainly did.
“Jesus Christ,” Jonas had muttered darkly. “I can’t stand this. You’ve been running around here like a crazy person for the past month.”
“I’m sorry if you can’t handle an uptick in intensity, brother,” Blue had replied. Through his teeth. “Noted.”
Jonas had flipped him the bird. Blue had responded in kind.
But it was Isaac who’d caught up to him when the meeting was over, falling into the same pace beside him as Blue had headed down to the water.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Blue gritted out.
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“I can guess.”
“If you can guess, then I don’t know why you’re still here, glaring at the tide.”
Blue liked to take the beach route back to his cabin when it was low tide, although not so much today, when he mostly wanted to break things. He and Isaac had stood down by the water’s edge for a moment, Fool’s Cove deceptively smooth before them. Blue put his hands on his hips and stared out at the water because it was better than sucker punching one of the best men he knew, but it didn’t soothe him the way it used to.