Page 2

I turn and look at the ladder, and on the third rung, at about the height of a big man's knee, there's a smear of dark soil.

He climbed up. Not all the way. Three rungs — high enough to see over the edge of the loft floor to where I was lying on my back with my mouth open and my boots still on. He stood there and looked at me sleeping, and I didn't wake up.

And the quilt. I fell asleep on top of it; I remember that much, the scratch of the wool against my cheek. I woke up under it, tucked to my chin, the edge folded neatly back the way you fold a hospital sheet.

I turn slowly and look at the chair by the stove. Yesterday it sat against the wall. Now it's pulled out into the middle of the room and turned to face the ladder, and the cushion still holds the dent of somebody heavy.

He didn't only look. He sat down and stayed.

My stomach turns over.

I sit down hard in the chair by the stove, before I start to feel sick.

I came to Hollow Creek to stop feeling things for a while. The reason I gave my charge nurse was accumulated leave and mandatory rest following the incident review, and all of that is true, but the truer version is a fourteen-hour shift and three crashing patients and a sixty-one-year-old man, whom I did everything right for, and lost anyway. Afterwards I sat in my car in the parkade at six in the morning and couldn't make myself drive home. So I drove north instead, seven hours, to a valley I found in a forum post that promised no cell service and the kind of quiet that sits on you like a hand. The woman at the general store handed me a key before I'd said a word.

"You'll be the nurse," she said.

I was still in my scrubs under my coat, the badge clipped to the pocket. I'd forgotten. I looked down at it and back up at her, and she was already writing something in a ledger, a grey braid over one shoulder and reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

"Maple cabin," she said. "End of the east path. There's firewood, but you won't need to worry about it."

"Why not?"

She smiled at her ledger. "Somebody'll see to it."

I thought she meant a caretaker. I thought she'd read my badge. I was too tired to think anything else.

I sit in the chair with the fire going and my pulse going and the note in my lap, and I wait to feel the thing I should feel, which is afraid.

I am afraid.

I'm also something else, and I don't like it. It's low and warm and it arrives on the back of the fear like it's been riding there the whole time, and it has to do with the smear of dirt on that rung and the idea of a stranger's eyes on me while I was completely, stupidly unguarded. Someone watched me at my worst and didn't flinch. Someone watched me and then took care of me.

I press my thighs together and hate myself a little.

That night I lock the door.

I turn the deadbolt and check it twice and shove the chair in front of it, and then I lie up in the loft in the dark with my eyes open, listening to the creek. I don't drink the tea. I wish I had wine, but he poured it all out.

At ten past one, the deadbolt turns.

I hear it slide back — slow, metal on metal, a sound I'd know anywhere now — and then the soft scrape of the chair being lifted aside and set down again, carefully, where it belongs. The door opens. Cold air comes in and stops. The door closes.

He has a key.

Every muscle in my body locks. My heart goes so hard I can feel it in my teeth. I lie on my back with the quilt pulled to my chin and do the only thing I can think of, which is what I've watched a thousand patients do when they want the night nurse to leave them alone: I slow my breathing down. In through the nose, long and even. Out through the mouth, a little slack. Twelve a minute. Textbook sleep.

Below me, the stove door opens. Wood goes in, one piece at a time. The stove door closes.

Then his steps come across the floor to the foot of the ladder, and stop.

He's standing right below me. I can feel him there the way you feel a hand an inch from your skin, heat without contact, and I keep breathing slow and even while my pulse slams and my mind screams at me to move. And somewhere in the middle of that, between one fake breath and the next, the fear turns over and shows me what's underneath it. My nipples are tight against the quilt. I'm wet. Lying rigid in the dark with a strange man at the foot of my ladder, and I'm wet.

He stays for a long time. He doesn't climb.

Then his steps go back across the floor, and the door opens and closes, and the deadbolt slides home again from the outside.

I lie there shaking until the window lights up with dawn.