Free Coffee

You sleep three hours in a guest room with a lock on the inside and a quilt that smells like cedar, and you dream about teeth.

When you come downstairs, Rowan is already up, standing at the kitchen window with a mug. She's in a gray thermal and jeans, hair still damp. She doesn't turn around.

"Coffee's on the stove," she says. "Mara texted. Tires are done."

"You didn't sleep."

"I slept."

"You're lying. You said you don't lie."

That gets her to look at you. Something flickers in her face that might, on someone else, be the start of a laugh. "I sat on the porch," she admits. "Same thing."

She drives you down to Larkspur Road. The cabin looks exactly how you left it: sagging porch, a woodpile you've been meaning to stack, your field boots by the door. Normal. Aggressively normal.

You go straight to your laptop.

The Cascade Wolf Project runs eleven trail cameras on your stretch of the Blackpine. They upload to a cloud account every night. You open the dashboard, scroll to camera nine, the one in the draw east of the clearing, and click last night's folder.

No files.

You click camera ten. Camera eight.

No files. No files. No files.

"No, no, no." You scroll back. Everything from the last week on those three cameras is gone. Not corrupted. Deleted. The log just says removed by user.

You turn around. Rowan is leaning in the doorway with her arms folded.

"Did you do this?"

"I've been with you since midnight," she says.

That's not a no. You open your mouth to point that out, and she straightens, eyes going to the road. A second later you hear it too: tires on gravel.

"Your truck," she says. "I'll be in town if you need me." She pauses at the door. "Ethan. Don't go into the woods today."

"It's my job to go into the woods."

"Not today."

You last until eleven before you need caffeine and people and something that isn't the inside of your own head.

Dot's Diner is on Main Street, between a fly shop and a real estate office with faded posters of log homes. You've eaten here a dozen times. It's red vinyl booths and pie under glass domes and Dot herself, sixty-something, steel-gray curls, a voice like a gravel truck.

The bell over the door jingles. Every head in the diner turns.

Every single one.

A man at the counter stops chewing. Two women in a booth lean together and whisper. The cook, a shaggy guy with a guitar pick behind his ear, leans so far out the service window he nearly falls through it.

You stand there in the doorway like the groom who walked into the wrong wedding.

"Well, come in, honey, you're letting the heat out," Dot says. She's already pouring. She sets the mug in front of the stool at the end of the counter and pats the vinyl. "Sit."

You sit.

"I'll have the..."

"It's on the house."

"I didn't order yet."

"Doesn't matter." Dot leans on the counter and looks at you with frank, enormous interest. "Nothing's going to cost you anything in here ever again. That's how it works."

"How what works?"

The cook leans out further. "Hi! I'm Jesse. I'm the brother. The good-looking one."

"Jesse, the bacon," Dot says without looking back.

"The bacon's fine. Hi," Jesse says to you again, delighted. "She's never done anything like this. Never. Not once. She doesn't even let people pick the music in the truck."

"Jesse."

"Going." He vanishes. The bacon sizzles louder, like it's offended.

You wrap both hands around the coffee. "Everyone in here knows."

"Everyone in here is," Dot says, and winks.

You're halfway through a slice of marionberry pie you didn't order when the bell jingles again, and the whole diner changes temperature.

The woman in the doorway is very beautiful and knows it. Late twenties, long copper hair, a camel coat that costs more than your truck. She looks around the room, finds you, and smiles like she's found the last cookie in the jar.

"Sasha," Dot says. Not warmly.

"Dot. You look wonderful." Sasha slides onto the stool next to yours without asking. She smells like rain and expensive soap. "So. You're the one."

"I'm sorry?"

"The human." She tilts her head. "Sasha Kerrigan. Redmoor pack, two valleys over. My father is Alpha there. I drove three hours this morning because I simply had to see what Rowan Ashby threw away a very good alliance for."

You set your fork down. "I don't know what that means."

"No, I can tell." She studies you without malice, which is somehow worse. "Rowan and I were supposed to be a sensible arrangement. Two packs, one border, everyone happy. She's been dodging it for a year. And then last night she stands up in front of everyone and claims a human biologist who tracks wolves for a living." Sasha laughs, delighted. "It's almost romantic."

"I didn't ask her to do it."

"Oh, I know. That's the interesting part." She leans closer and lowers her voice. "Let me save you some heartache, sweetheart. Rowan is a very good Alpha. She will always, always choose the pack. Whatever she's feeling for you, if it comes down to you or them, it's them. That's what she is."

She stands, drops a twenty on the counter for a coffee she never drank, and squeezes your shoulder.

"It was nice to meet you, Ethan," she says, and leaves.

You don't remember telling her your name either.

Rowan finds you on your porch at dusk, sitting on the steps with a beer you haven't touched.

She doesn't come up. She stands at the bottom of the steps with her hands in her jacket pockets.

"Sasha came to see you."

"News travels."

"Dot called me before Sasha's car was out of the lot." She hesitates. "Whatever she said..."

"She said you'll always choose the pack."

Rowan is quiet for a moment. "She's not wrong about what I'm supposed to do."

That shouldn't sting. You've known this woman for less than a day. It stings anyway.

She pulls a hand out of her pocket and holds out a card. Plain white, a phone number in pencil. "This is mine. If anyone so much as looks at you wrong, you text me. Day or night."

"Do I get a choice about any of this?"

"You get a choice about all of it," she says. "That's the point." Then she turns and walks into the trees, and the dark swallows her before you can say anything else.

At ten you go out to bring in firewood.

Your flashlight swings across the frost on the grass, and you freeze.

Prints. Huge ones. Wolf prints, but wrong, too big, the size of your spread hand. They come out of the trees, walk to your porch, and then they go around. All the way around the cabin. You follow them with the light, heart pounding, and they circle back to where they started. Again. And again. A worn ring in the frost, like something paced around your home for hours.

You back inside and lock the door and stand in the middle of the kitchen, breathing too fast.

Your phone buzzes on the table.

You stare at it. You haven't saved her number. You didn't text her.

The screen lights up anyway.

Door locked?