Chapter 13: Nobody Looks Down

I slid off the counter and grabbed my phone.

Fourteen texts. Fern, the pack mothers, numbers I didn't even have saved.

"What was that?"

"Did you feel that?"

"Is that coming from the ridge?"

Fern's just said, "BRYN. WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM."

I held the screen up so Gunnar could see it.

He read it and closed his eyes.

"Nobody's going to sleep tonight," he said.

"Neither are we."

He looked at me, at my mouth, and then very deliberately at the ceiling.

"I'm going to the barn."

"It's thirty degrees."

"That's the idea."

He went.

I lay on the couch where he'd been and breathed in the smell he'd left on the blanket.

That didn't help at all.

In the morning the old mechanic drove up the ridge at seven.

He parked by the barn and got out with a toolbox he obviously didn't need.

"Heard your truck was making a noise," he told Gunnar.

"My truck's fine."

"Then I'll listen to it anyway."

He stood in the barn doorway for an hour holding a wrench, and never opened the hood once.

At nine two of Colt's enforcers came up in a pickup.

They stood at the fence and watched Gunnar split wood, and when he looked over at them, both of them looked at their boots.

By noon the pack mothers who usually dropped their kids and ran had stopped running.

Four of them sat on the porch with coffee.

One brought a pie.

"For the house," she said, and didn't say which house she meant.

Glory came and stood next to me at the window, eating a slice off her palm.

"Why is everybody staring at Rancher?"

"Because he's interesting now."

"He was always interesting. He made twelve desks."

"Different kind of interesting."

She watched Gunnar carry a load of wood past the porch.

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