Chapter 22: The Cabin

Rowan's POV

We drove down out of the Council Stone at first light with her phone in the cup holder and her bare feet on my dashboard.

She didn't talk.

Trudy had loaded the truck bed with an axe, a hammer, nails, a hinge set and a bedroll.

She had told me not to come back before dark.

The Basin opened out below the ridge, a long river valley gone gold with early frost.

Hazel sat up straight.

"Stop," she said, and I pulled over.

She got out and stood at the road's edge with her hand over her mouth.

The pines she'd grown up under stood in rows along the water.

The old den was a dark mouth in the bank.

"It's all still here," she said. "I thought he'd have taken the roof off."

"Nobody touched it."

"My grandmother's porch."

She pointed up the valley at a gray line against the trees.

"Is that it?"

"That's the cabin," I said.

We left the truck at the end of the track and walked the last hundred yards.

The kitchen table stood where I had been told it would be, in the clearing, with a black patch of scorched grass beside it.

Its legs had gone soft with rot, and one corner had split.

Hazel stopped three steps away.

"He put the papers right there," she said. "I knelt on that spot."

"Do you want me to take it apart?"

"No."

She took the axe out of my hand.

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