Page 40 of Trapped with the Forest Ranger
“This is incredible.” I reach for my camera, framing the scene, but nothing in my lens can touch the wild immensity before us.
“The eagle’s nest is there.” Caleb points, his arm brushing mine as he leans in. I follow his gesture to a nearly invisible tangle of sticks tucked into a distant cliff face. “Too far for a good shot without a telephoto. But if you’re patient, you might catch them returning.”
“I don’t see any eagles.” I lower the camera, searching the sky.
“They hunt midday. Should be back by afternoon.” He settles on a flat boulder, unpacking sandwiches and water with the same careful hands that soothed a wild animal, that steadied me on the trail. “If you’re willing to wait.”
I sit beside him, our shoulders almost touching. We eat incompanionable silence, clouds drifting across the sun, shadows chasing over the valley. The world feels impossibly big, our worries suddenly small—yet the space between us is charged, every brush of his hand, every shared glance, a silent promise.
After a while, I find the courage to ask, “What happened that day? On Carson Ridge?”
He goes still, the question hanging in the air. For a long moment, I think he’ll shut me out. But then he speaks, voice stripped bare. “Routine evac. Lightning fire moving fast. My crew was getting hikers out before the flames cut off the trail. We’d done it a hundred times.”
I wait, sensing the weight pressing down on him.
“There was a family—tourists. Their boy got separated during the evacuation.” Caleb’s voice is tight, flat. Too controlled. “I doubled back to find him. Kim came, even though I told her not to.”
His grip tightens around the water bottle, plastic crackling under his fingers. His knuckles go stark white.
“What happened?” Something icy slithers down my spine.
“We split up.” His jaw flexes. “I should’ve stopped her. She said we had time, but fires don’t give a damn about your confidence.”
The silence stretches, brittle and sharp.
“I found the kid,” he finally says. “Got him back to the rendezvous point. But the wind had shifted. The fire jumped ahead. Cut her off.”
He doesn’t look at me. His stare is fixed somewhere past the walls, lost in smoke and memory.
“She was behind the line.” His voice breaks—just a fracture. A single fault line beneath all that granite. “She didn’t make it.”
The trail stretchesahead, open and endless, but it feels like the world just shrank around us. Like the trees are listening. Like the mountain itself is holding its breath.
The wind shifts, carrying the scent of pine and wet earth—but underneath it, something colder. Grief, maybe. Regret. The weight of everything he’s not saying coils in the silence between us, thick as smoke.
It wraps around his shoulders like a second skin, heavy and worn. The guilt. The what-ifs. The split-second decisions that splinter into a thousand sleepless nights.
And I swear—for a moment—it’s not the fire he’s remembering.
It’s her scream he never heard.
Her hand he never grabbed.
The part of himself he left behind in the flames.
“She trusted me to keep her safe. And I let her walk into a death trap.” His voice is barely above a whisper now, but every word hits like an ember. Controlled. Precise. Devastating. “She died because I wasn’t enough.”
I reach for his hand, covering it with mine. He doesn’t pull away. His skin is warm, the pulse beneath my palm steady but fragile.
“You couldn’t have known,” I say softly.
“I should have.” His voice is a raw scrape.
“Caleb.” I squeeze his hand, grounding him. “That’s not on you.”
He lets out a shaky breath, trying for lightness. “Two years of therapy says you’re right. Doesn’t change the way it feels.”
“So you came here.”
