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“I admitted the drainage was blocked.”

“Because of my fungus.”

He straightened slowly and gave me a look that suggested I was becoming a problem he hadn’t planned for. “You’re going to keep calling it that, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

He started down the ridge without answering.

I shouldered my bag and followed him. “Barrett?”

“No.”

“I haven’t asked anything yet.”

“Getting ahead of it.”

I laughed, and one rounded ear flicked back toward me.

This time, I was almost certain he was smiling.

Chapter 4

Barrett

The bread came out of the oven at ten past four.

I hadn’t planned on baking. I’d woken at half-past three with my skin not fitting right, and the kitchen was the only room in the cabin that had ever offered solace.

I turned the loaves onto the rack and stood listening to the crust tick as it cooled.

Then I started making lunch.

The shelf above the stove held twenty years of things I’d carried out of the woods and never been able to account for: dried leaf, seed, bark, root. Jars I’d filled because the plant had seemed to want picking, labeled in my own handwriting with names I’d made up. The second jar from the left held cornflowers. Still blue. I took down the honey and didn’t look at the cornflowers again.

The first lunch was the usual: four rounds of bread, most of a ham, half a wheel of yesterday’s cheese, three boiled eggs, a jar of pickles, and the heel of the loaf eaten standing at the counter while I built the rest. People who saw me eat once pulled a face usually reserved for traffic accidents. I’d stopped apologizing for it around the time I stopped fitting through doors.

Then I made the second one.

No cheese. She’d picked it out on the second day, quietly setting it on the edge of the wrapper as if hoping I wouldn’t notice, then apologized for being difficult. An extra apple because she ate the first one before ten and pretended she hadn’t. Tea in the flask instead of water because above the ridgeline she went quiet in a way that meant she was cold and had decided it wasn’t worth mentioning.

I wrapped it and set it in the pack beside mine.

A woman who faints two miles from the truck is a woman I had to carry out. That was the reason. It held up if I didn’t look too closely at it.

She was already at the trailhead when I pulled in, sitting on the tailgate of the Jeep with her boots swinging. The soil corer she’d never used was propped up beside her like she might need it today. Six days in, and she still packed like she was staging an expedition to somewhere she wasn’t coming back from.

Her braid was already losing its hold. One curl had come free at the temple and was doing whatever it wanted; she hadn’t noticed, but I had, and I put that somewhere I didn’t have to look at it.

“Morning,” she said.

“You eaten?”

“I’ll eat later.”

She always said that. I filed it the way I filed a hairline crack in a limb.

We took the north track. The rain had returned overnight, and the ground gave underfoot. I walked ahead of her without discussion; the ground east of the beeches looked solid but wasn’t, and demonstrating the safe path myself was quicker than any explanation.