The Last to Vanish(34)

Celeste commanded an unparalleled respect here in Cutter’s Pass, especially from those in the younger generation. It wasn’t just me who had come to see her as a parent-adjacent figure. At some point, many of them had worked here—either officially or unofficially. When I’d first met Rochelle and Jack, it had been at an inn happy hour, just after the winter renovation when I’d arrived. They had been running some supplies up to Celeste as a favor, and she’d invited them to stay. They’d peppered me with questions—Where are you from and How long are you staying and What brought you to Cutter’s Pass of all places—and Celeste had stepped into our circle, a hand on my shoulder, and said, This is Abby, Vincent’s niece. She’s going to be helping me here. And that was all that ever needed to be said. People in town knew who I was before I’d even had a chance to meet them. They called me by name when I passed in the street, and I felt a close familiarity to these people I had yet to know deeply.

Cory had his sleeves rolled up, hands on his hips, tattoo on his forearm visible—a swooping vine, sliding back under the edge of his sleeve. Everything about him was ivy and vine, and he could tell the stories marked across his body the same as he could tell the history of this place.

He saw me looking and dropped his arms to his sides. “What have you been doing?” he asked, finally taking me in.

“I took Trey West down to Shallow Falls.”

He stared at me. “And?”

“And now I’m taking him to talk to the sheriff.”

He turned back to the shelves, dropped another box onto the concrete with purpose. “You don’t have to do this, Abby.”

“Yeah well.” I shrugged with one shoulder, even though he wasn’t looking.

“Abby, seriously.” He stopped what he was doing, turned to face me. “We don’t owe him anything.”

“Don’t we?” His brother disappeared on my watch. “He was going to do that hike on his own if I didn’t offer to take him. Would’ve probably kept going through the pass, totally unprepared. Last thing the inn needs is another guest getting lost out there.”

“Then he’s reckless, Abby. Keep out of it. Keep away from him.”

How could I expect Cory to understand—the feeling that the answers could be found through Trey, somehow, danger or not. I raised a hand, cutting off the line of discussion. There was no point in arguing with Cory. Neither of us would give an inch. “When’s the last time you were down at the falls?”

He rubbed the side of his face. “Last week sometime. Why?”

“I didn’t remember cairns on the trail on the other side.”

He shook his head. “We use paint on the trail. Probably just kids. People on a picnic, building a pile of stones. You know how it gets in the summer. It’s a well-traveled trail, Abby.”

I nodded, noncommittally, and it was like he could see right through me. Every thought. Every worry.

He took a step closer, lowered his voice. “There’s nothing out there. I promise. I’ve lived here my whole life.” A smirk that brought me back ten years, to the both of us in almost this very same spot.

I smiled tightly. “I’ve gotta run. Georgia’s only giving me an extra hour.”

And with the mention of her name, any thread of nostalgia between us was severed.



* * *



I WAS USED TO seeing Cory everywhere. I wasn’t even surprised to see him here now, in a place that should’ve felt private and mine.

When I’d officially met Cory for the first time, I didn’t know anything about who he was. Just that he stood behind the bar at the tavern and poured me a drink without asking for ID, and when I slid some cash across the bar top, he said, Oh, I’m not working here tonight. He had the pronounced lightness of being a decade younger then, at least one fewer tattoo, a future that was still more promise than expectation. He slid onto the bar stool beside me, told me his name, and said if I was going to be staying awhile, he was a good person to know. That he knew everything about this place.

I asked him the species of trees that lined the streets, and he didn’t know. I asked him the annual rainfall, and he laughed.

Two visits later, and I told him, in the hesitant way that I presented all information then, that I was going to be working at the inn, and he said he knew that, with a small smile. And when I left that night, I told him I’d be staying there, too. He said he knew that, too, and this time I laughed.

And later that night, when I went downstairs to the otherwise unoccupied basement, he was standing near the back entrance, the private one hidden at the back of the inn, and I said, How did you get in here?

I told you, he’d said, I know everything about this place. And then his smile faltered, and he looked behind him, toward the door, and he said, I wasn’t sure if—

I knew what he meant before he finished. He wasn’t sure if it was an invitation. But it was.

The thing about Cory then was he was both cocky and unsure at the same time, a little overexposed, never paying much attention to the times his heart was on his sleeve or his foot in his mouth. And for a time, I’d fallen for both.

It was lonely down there, in a different way than I’d been lonely before, after my mother’s death, finding myself on my own, with no direction—like time had stopped. At the inn, time kept moving, but sometimes I wasn’t sure if this place was real. Whether I was. I felt so far from the person I’d once been, not sure what I was really doing here. Like someone new being forged in the bones of this place. I imagined myself rising out of the concrete floor, made of intricate locks and steel and unbreakable glass. For that first year, my world shrank to a bubble, and the things that I loved in it were: this place, that mountain, and him.