Updated Apr 11, 2026 • ~10 min read
Chapter 9: The Rhythm
Jackson
By the end of the first week, we’ve found a rhythm.
It’s not comfortable exactly—there’s still too much sexual tension crackling in the air whenever we’re in close proximity, still too many moments where our eyes meet and hold for just a beat too long—but it’s functional. We’ve figured out how to coexist in this small space without driving each other completely insane, and that feels like a minor miracle given how we started.
She cooks now. Not well, but competently enough that I don’t have to worry about her burning the cabin down or wasting precious food. She’s learned the temperature of the wood stove, learned how to judge when meat is done without a thermometer, learned that adding wild herbs can make even the simplest meal taste less like survival rations.
I hunt. Check the traps. Bring back game. Keep us fed.
It’s a partnership, unexpected and unplanned, and it works better than either of us probably wants to admit.
The evenings are when things get dangerous.
That’s when we sit by the fire—her on her bed, me in my chair, Bear between us like a furry chaperone—and somehow we always end up talking. Sometimes she reads aloud from my books, and I discover that she has a voice made for it, rich and expressive, bringing poetry and classic literature to life in a way that makes me understand why people become actors. She reads Frost and Whitman and Mary Oliver, and her voice wraps around the words like she’s making love to them.
Other times, we just talk.
Tonight, she’s telling me about her life in New York, and there’s a hollowness in her voice that I recognize all too well.
“I thought making partner would fix it,” she says, staring into the fire. “The loneliness. The feeling that I was just… going through the motions. I thought if I just worked hard enough, achieved enough, proved myself enough, then I’d finally feel like my life meant something.”
“Did it work?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“No.” She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “I spent ten years killing myself for this career, sacrificing relationships and hobbies and any semblance of a personal life, and for what? So I could bill 80 hours a week and make senior partners richer? So I could live in an empty apartment in a city full of millions of people and still feel completely alone?”
I understand that feeling more than I want to admit.
“I had friends,” she continues. “Or at least, people I called friends. But they were all lawyers too, and our friendships were based on shared misery and expensive happy hours where we complained about our cases and our bosses. We never talked about anything real. Never shared anything that mattered.”
“Did you have anyone?” I ask. “Someone who knew the real you?”
“My parents. Kenzie, my best friend from college—she’s a teacher, lives in Boston. We don’t see each other much, but she’s the only person who still calls me out on my bullshit.” She pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “What about you? Before you came here, did you have people?”
“My unit,” I say quietly. “They were my brothers. We knew everything about each other—the good, the bad, the ugly. You can’t go through what we went through without becoming family.”
“And then you lost them.”
“Yeah.” The grief is still there, sharp and fresh even after five years. “IED. We were three weeks from coming home. Three weeks. And then they were just… gone.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I think she might change the subject, might retreat to something safer. But instead she asks, “Is that why you came here? Because you couldn’t handle losing them?”
“Yes and no.” I lean back in my chair, trying to find words for something I’ve never really articulated before. “I came here because the world stopped making sense after they died. I was the only survivor. Just me. And everyone kept saying I was lucky, that I should be grateful, but all I could think was why? Why did I survive when they didn’t? What made me so special that I got to live and they had to die?”
“Survivor’s guilt.”
“Yeah. That and the PTSD. The nightmares. The panic attacks. The way I couldn’t be in crowds anymore because every stranger felt like a threat. The way loud noises made me hit the deck. The way I couldn’t hold down a job or maintain a relationship because I was so fucked up inside.” I run a hand through my hair. “Coming here wasn’t really a choice. It was survival. I was either going to retreat to the mountains or I was going to eat my gun. Those were my options.”
“Jackson—”
“I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me,” I say quickly. “I’m telling you because you asked about my life before, and this is the truth. I came here because I was broken, and this was the only place I could figure out how to put myself back together.”
“You’re not broken,” she says fiercely. “You’re healing. There’s a difference.”
“Maybe.” I look at her, at the firelight playing across her face, at the conviction in her eyes. “Or maybe I’m just running. Maybe I’m hiding from the world because I’m too scared to try living in it again.”
“You’re not hiding.” She says it with such certainty that I almost believe her. “You’re healing. And healing looks different for everyone. Just because your healing involves mountains and solitude doesn’t make it less valid than someone who heals in therapy or support groups or whatever else people do.”
“You sound like you’ve thought about this before.”
“My dad,” she says simply. “He tried the therapy, the support groups, the medication. Some of it helped. But what really saved him was finding a place where he could breathe. For him, it was hiking. For you, it’s this.” She gestures to the cabin, to the wilderness beyond. “That’s not running. That’s surviving.”
“Sometimes running is surviving,” I say quietly.
“Exactly.” She smiles at me, and it’s warm and understanding and free of judgment. “So stop beating yourself up for choosing a different path than other people think you should take.”
We sit in silence for a while, and I realize this is the first time I’ve talked about my unit, about the ambush, about why I really came here, without feeling like I need to defend my choices or explain myself or make it palatable for someone else’s comfort.
She just… gets it.
“What about you?” I ask. “Why did you really go on that hike? It wasn’t just about proving Marcus wrong, was it?”
She’s quiet for so long I think she might not answer. But then:
“I think part of me wanted to get lost.”
The admission hangs in the air between us.
“Not lost like what happened,” she continues. “Not life-threatening lost. Just… lost enough that I had an excuse to not go back. To not face another week of billable hours and partnership pressure and that empty apartment.” She looks at me. “I think I’ve been looking for an escape for a long time, and that hike was supposed to be it. I was supposed to come back feeling refreshed and adventurous and ready to tackle my life again. Instead I got actually lost and nearly died and ended up here, and the really messed up thing is that this—” she gestures around the cabin “—this has been more peaceful than my actual life.”
“Being trapped in a cabin with a grumpy asshole during a blizzard is peaceful?”
“Yes.” She laughs. “Because it’s real. You’re real. This is real. Everything else in my life has been performance and appearances and climbing a ladder that doesn’t actually go anywhere. But this? Learning to survive, to cook over a fire, to chop wood badly? It matters. It’s tangible. It’s real.”
I understand that too.
We talk for hours, long past when we should have gone to sleep, sharing stories and confessions and truths that we probably wouldn’t share anywhere else. She tells me about the cases that made her question whether justice actually exists, about the clients she couldn’t save, about the slow erosion of her idealism until all that was left was cynicism and billable hours.
I tell her about Morrison’s terrible jokes and Hayes’s country music obsession and Chen’s dreams of opening a restaurant when he got home. I tell her about the guilt that eats at me, about the way I sometimes forget they’re dead and start to tell Bear a story about them before I remember. I tell her about the nightmares where I have to watch them die over and over again, unable to save them, unable to do anything but survive.
And she listens. Really listens. Not just waiting for her turn to talk, but actually hearing what I’m saying, understanding the weight of it.
“You’re not hiding,” she says again, when the fire has burned down to embers and the cabin is lit only by the soft glow. “You’re healing. And I think… I think maybe I need to learn how to heal too.”
“You’ll figure it out,” I say. “You’re stubborn enough.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“From me? Yeah. Stubbornness is a survival trait.”
She laughs, and the sound fills the cabin with warmth that has nothing to do with the fire.
“We should sleep,” I say, even though I don’t want this moment to end. “It’s late.”
“Yeah.” But she doesn’t move, and neither do I.
We sit there in the darkness, two broken people who’ve somehow managed to find understanding in the most unlikely of places, and I think about how in a week—maybe less—she’ll be gone.
Back to New York. Back to her life. Back to the world I left behind.
And this—whatever this is that’s building between us—will end before it even has a chance to begin.
The thought makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with old injuries and everything to do with the terrifying realization that I don’t want her to leave.
That I’m starting to need her here almost as much as I need the solitude these mountains provide.
Which is a problem I don’t have any idea how to solve.
“Goodnight, Sloane.”
“Goodnight, Jackson.”
She curls up under her blankets, and I watch the rise and fall of her breathing until I’m sure she’s asleep.
And then I sit there in the darkness, listening to the wind howl outside and the fire crackle inside, and admit to myself what I’ve been trying to deny for days:
I’m falling for her.
And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
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