Chapter 153

Sloane

He was waiting on the porch when I came out.

It was still dark. Not the black of the middle of the night, but the deep blue that comes an hour before the sun, when the snow glows faintly from underneath and the trees stand out against it like ink. He was sitting on the top step in his coat with his elbows on his knees, and he got up when the door opened, and looked at me, and didn’t say good morning.

“This way,” he said.

He led. I followed.

Not along the stream, where I had gone yesterday. Up. Behind the cabin, past the woodpile, onto a narrow track I hadn’t seen before that wound up through the pines in long switchbacks. He walked it without a light. He didn’t need one. He went up it the way you walk through your own house in the dark, without looking, his boots finding every step, and I followed in his tracks and tried not to breathe too hard.

He didn’t look back to see if I was keeping up. But every so often, at the top of a switc