Chapter 180

Sloane

For three days, it was almost easy.

We came back up the mountain the evening after the hut, and Teague had the stove going and a pot of something on it, and the cabin smelled of woodsmoke and onions and wet wool. Nobody talked about the list. Nobody talked about the box. Malachi had given it to Liam, and it was gone, and the space where it had been in his pack was just space.

In the mornings, he split wood. I heard the axe through the wall of my room before it was light, the same slow, steady rhythm, the way I had heard it every morning since the storm. Teague went down to the wire and walked it, and came back with snow in his beard, and grunted, and made coffee. I sat at the table with my leg on the other chair and mended the elbow of Malachi’s good shirt, badly, because there was nobody else to do it and Teague couldn’t hold a needle. In the afternoons, if the sun came out, I let Rhea out and ran her down along the stream and back, and Malachi prete