The Patient Ranger

Fern Lockridge has run the Sable Basin dispatch desk for nine years, and she has loved the district's best ranger for eight of them, which is a fact she has never once said out loud and does not intend to. Owen Tsosie is steady, quiet, and good at his job, and when a hiker goes missing above the pass, he's the only one who knows the drainage. Eleven hours on a radio. One man out alive. One job offer in Boise that would take Fern an eight-hour drive away from everything she refuses to name. Then the north ridge lights up, the road closes, and the two of them end up in a Forest Service cabin with one cot, a dead radio, and fifteen years of everything unsaid.