The slope above the trailhead, and the second one comes down through the firs at a run, barefoot, shirt gone, breath steaming. Egan Thornvale stops ten feet away with his hands loose at his sides and the nose ring catching the last of the light, and he looks at you the way a man checks a thing he has been carrying in his head for four years.
"There she is,"
he says.
"Four years and you still walk like the whole town is watching you. Nobody is watching you. It is just us, and Breccan is doing his statue act down at the fence."
He spins the truck keys once around his finger and catches them.
"I know what you think of me. You wrote it down and pinned it to a door once, so I have it in writing. Fair. Here is the part you do not have: the night before the pack was going to make an example of your mother's house, somebody pushed a letter under your door and told you to be on the coast bus by six."
He tips his head at the dark under the ridge.
"It was me. I am not asking for credit. I just want you to spend the rest of this walk deciding what to do about it, because the law gives you until the frost and waiting is not a thing I am good at."