Chapter Text
I didn’t want the mountains to feel like a warning.
But the road up into Laurel Gap had that look. That slick, coil-tight asphalt threading a forest so dense
and dark the afternoon couldn’t find it. Pines rose like a wall on either side, their needles dripping from
last night’s rain, and the fog lay low over the switchbacks like it had decided the ground was good
enough for the sky.
My rental SUV complained around the last bend and then the town appeared all at once, a postcard
held too close to the face: a weathered main street, a diner with a hand-painted sign, a hardware store
that still sold bells on a pegboard, and, higher up the slope, a motel that had probably been called
“historic” after the last good year ended.
Laurel Gap Lodge. Vacancy in red neon that buzzed even when no one was looking.
I parked beneath the drooping limbs of an evergreen and checked the itinerary again, as if the words
might have rearranged themselves while I drove: Regional Systems Compliance Training: Site Audit.
Three towns. Five days. One consultant.
Knox Mercer.
I’d told myself all week that it didn’t matter who he was. He’d ride in the company SUV. I’d ride beside
him. We would talk about boring things. Checklists and timelines and which gas station had bathrooms
that didn’t feel like a dare. We’d nod at each other, maybe share a laugh, and then part ways like adults
do when the week is over and the sky isn’t haunted by the idea of snow.
My phone had no bars. Somehow that felt like a personal slight.
I grabbed my bag, locked the SUV out of habit, and crossed the gravel. The lobby door stuck like it
resented being asked to work; I tugged twice before it gave with a wet sigh.
Inside smelled like lemon cleaner fighting bravely against old wood. A heater rattled along the back wall,
working at one speed, too much. A woman in a red cardigan slid a ledger toward me with a pen leashed
to a chain.
“Checking in?” she asked. Her nametag said Jo.
“Rowan Hart,” I said. “There should be a booking under Midline Solutions.”
She squinted at the ledger, then at a computer that didn’t look like it believed in the internet. “Huh.
That’d be…two rooms. One for Hart. One for Mercer.”
“Knox Mercer?” I tried to say his name like it meant nothing, like it wasn’t a stone I kept finding in all my
pockets.
“Uh-huh. He’s here somewhere.” Jo gestured vaguely toward the rest of the building. “Came in about
twenty minutes ago. Said he’d be waiting.”
Waiting. The word landed warm. Then cool. I took the key she slid toward me, an actual key, with a blue
plastic fob stamped 214, and forced a smile.
“Second floor, end of the hall,” Jo said, already turning a page in the ledger. “We got coffee and hot
water in the lounge. Don’t trust the kettle in the rooms. It screams.”
“That’s…good to know.”
Back outside the lobby window, fog crawled down the slope like a slow certainty. I climbed the narrow
stairs, feeling the old boards count my steps.
The hallway was long and a little too quiet, the kind of quiet that made you think of closed mouths.
Room numbers marched by in brushed metal: 206, 208, 210. At the bend, a picture window showed me
the parking lot with my SUV under a crooked pine, and beyond that the road disappeared into trees that
weren’t interested in being friendly. When I turned the corner, I almost ran into him.
I'd seen his name in emails for months. Heard his voice on compliance calls. But standing in the same
hallway was different. It felt like meeting a ghost of a file attachment.
He leaned against the wall near 214, hands in his jacket pockets like the pockets had offended him and
he was forgiving them anyway. Tall. Dark jacket. A face you didn’t expect to be kind until it was. He
glanced at my key, then at me, and something like a smile moved through his eyes, didn’t commit to his
mouth.
“Rowan,” he said, like he’d already used the name in his head.
“Knox,” I said, because it seemed fair.
We stood there for a heartbeat in the hum of the heater and the far-off drip of the eaves. He had one of
those voices that could be quiet without being weak. Low enough that I felt it more than I heard it.
“You made good time,” he said.
“I drove like there was a prize,” I said, and immediately wished I’d said anything else.
He didn’t laugh, exactly. His mouth softened. “There is a prize,” he said. “Getting out before the storm
hits.”
“Storm?”
He tipped his chin toward the window at the bend. “They’re calling for ice. Maybe snow at elevation.
Tomorrow, we head up over Ridge Point. I’d rather not skate it.”
“Skating’s not on the checklist,” I said. That got the laugh. Quiet, reluctant, the sound of a man who
hadn’t planned on giving anything away.
He pushed off the wall. “You want to grab dinner after you drop your stuff? We can go over the plan.”
“Sure.” I lifted the key. “Give me ten?”
“Take fifteen,” he said, already stepping aside. “The kettle screams.”
I blinked. “She told you too.”
“She’s not wrong.”
I slid the key into 214. The door opened with the sleepy resistance of old hinges. When I glanced back,
Knox was already walking the hall, hands in pockets, a shape cut out of the dim, like a problem I wasn’t
ready to solve.
Inside, the room was exactly what the lobby had threatened: clean if you didn’t ask too many questions,
bedspread the color of yesterday’s river, a narrow desk, a picture of a waterfall that probably existed
somewhere just far enough away that you’d never reach itThe window looked out over the lot and the
shadows beyond it. My SUV sat obediently beneath it. Two other cars. A third I didn’t recognize: black
pickup, matte paint, the kind of truck that didn’t want to be seen until it did. Something about it
felt…uninvited. Like it hadn’t come to stay, just to watch.
I told myself it was nothing and set my bag on the bed.
The kettle didn’t scream when I touched it. It waited until I plugged it in. When it did, it sounded like a
small creature discovering pain. I unplugged it and whispered, “I believe you,” and went for the lounge
instead.
The lounge was one door down from the lobby, a room pretending to be a living room. Brown couch, a
bookshelf of abandoned paperbacks, a TV on mute running a local station where the weatherman
gestured at a map full of blue like he was painting the state cold.
Knox was there, bent over a table with two paper cups of coffee and a stack of papers clipped on the
corner. He’d traded the jacket for a sweater that made his eyes look darker. I told myself I wasn’t
noticing. I noticed anyway.
“Decaf or poor choices?” he asked.
“I drove three hours on string cheese and a podcast about haunted lighthouses,” I said. “Poor choices.”
He slid the cup toward me. He didn’t touch my hand. It felt like he could have. He kept a consistent two
feet of space between us, like a man who understood the math of lines he could and couldn’t cross.
“We start in Laurel Gap clinic tomorrow,” he said, tapping the top paper. “Then Black Finch campus.
Ridge Point on Wednesday if the weather lets us. If it doesn’t, we reverse. Either way, we’ll have to
make up time somewhere.”
“I can do long days,” I said. “It helps me avoid calling my mother.”
That almost smile again. “I’ll add that to the risk assessment.”
We went over the list. He was neat. Efficient without being sharp. He asked questions he already knew
the answers to, not to test me but to map the shape of what I knew. At some point I stopped looking at
his mouth and started thinking about the work, which felt like a tiny victory considering the mouth in
question.
By the time we had an order that looked like something we could win against, the weatherman had
graduated to pointing at camera like we were personally responsible.
“Dinner?” he asked.
“Please,” I said. “Before Jo decides the lodge closes at seven like it’s 1951.”
“The diner on Main,” he said. “They make a stew they think is a secret.”
We took the side stairs. The fog had slipped closer, laid itself low over the lot until the trucks looked cut
from paper. We walked the block to the diner in a quiet that wasn’t awkward, just…spare. The town had
tucked itself in, windows yellow, doors closed, a single dog watching us from a porch like a neighbor
trying to remember where he’d seen us before.
Inside, the diner was warm, linoleum, neon clock, a waitress who wore her hair high and her suspicion
higher.
“Two?” she asked.
“Two,” Knox said.
We slid into a booth by the window. The table was scarred but clean, the kind of clean that came from
bleach and not elbow grease. A ceiling fan turned overhead. Slow, rhythmic, clicking like a second hand
with no clock attached.
We ate the stew that wasn’t a secret and made small talk that didn’t feel small. He’d done this kind of
contract work for years. Compliance, audits, fixing lines that got crossed. He’d grown up two states over.
He’d been to Laurel Gap once as a kid to see a meteor shower in a field and spent the whole night
thinking about falling.
I kept my pieces close. He didn’t pry. When he did ask a question it was the kind that admitted he didn’t
get to have the answer unless I wanted to give it. How long I’d been with Midline (two years), if I liked
the travel (sometimes), why I picked systems (because systems pretended there were rules, even when
the people inside them didn’t).
Back at the lodge, a damp chill threaded the hall. The heater clicked like a nervous habit. Knox walked
me to my door, and even though it was ten steps from his, it felt like we were deciding something by
making the walk together.
“Breakfast at seven?” he said.
“I’ll be a person by eight.”
“Seven thirty,” he compromised.
“Deal.”
He hesitated, just enough to let me see it, then touched two fingers to the fob of my key and stepped
back. “Lock your door,” he said, and it should have sounded like a joke because the hall was empty and
the lodge was quiet and I was grown, but it didn’t. It sounded like a man who knew what quiet could let
in.
“I always do,” I lied.
I waited until his door clicked. Mine followed. I dropped my bag on the chair, brushed my teeth like I
could scrub off the road, and stood at the window with one hand cupped to the glass the way you do
when you want to see past your own reflection and into the dark.
The lot was still. My SUV waiting beneath the branches. The two cars. The black truck. A thread of fog
unspooling across the asphalt like breath.
Something moved.
Just a step. A shape where there shouldn’t have been one. Near the trucks. The fog made everything a
rumor, but for a second I thought I saw a figure. Tall, shoulders lifted, head turned toward the lodge.
I told myself it was a shadow and stepped back.
The heater kicked on. Pipes hissed. The room settled.
I remembered Knox’s voice, “Lock your door.” and locked it properly this time. The extra bolt, the chain
that would stop exactly no one, the ritual of being brave.
I changed, slid beneath sheets that had never heard my name, and stared at the ceiling while the
mountains re-arranged the night into narrower, darker shapes.
I was almost asleep when someone knocked.
Three soft knocks. Not a neighbor asking for a spare towel. Not a prank. That careful kind of knock
people use when they know your name and don’t want to scare you. The kind that sounds like it doesn’t
want to be a sound at all.
Adrenaline did the thing it does. Cold hands, hot skin. I sat up so fast my heart forgot what to do next.
The heater hummed. The hall stayed quiet. I didn’t breathe.
Another knock. Lighter.
My phone had no bars. The red x at the top of the screen felt like a decision someone else had made for
me. I stared at the door. My feet found the floor. I crossed the room, slow, slow, slow, and put my eye
to the peephole.
Fog made a fishbowl of the hall. The yellow dome light down the way turned the air into soup.
No one stood outside my door.
But the handle was turned down.
Just slightly. Enough to make the latch rest against the strike plate like a mouth against teeth.
I stepped back. The air felt thin in the room, thin in my chest.
I didn’t open it. I didn’t say hello. I didn’t pretend I was the kind of woman who thought this was a
mistake people made by accident at other doors.
I moved to the nightstand, took the pen and the little pad of paper meant for notes about nothing, and
wrote two words with a dull, pressed line:
Knock. Handle.
I didn’t know who I needed to prove it to, tomorrow Rowan, the version of me who would wake up and
try to file it under nervous imagination, or the man whose name was still in the room like a scent he
hadn’t left here.
I picked up my key and stood there with it in my fist like a charm.
Then I slid the dresser six inches across the carpet, just enough to make it annoying if anyone decided
the chain was merely a suggestion.
The heater clanked. The lodge sighed. Far away, a truck engine turned over and went quiet again.
I lay down. I didn’t sleep for an hour. When I did, I dreamt about fog pressing itself flat against the glass like a face.