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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.