He spotted her before she spotted him. Mara Hale, 52, the new city council rep who’d voted three weeks prior to slash funding for the backcountry trail system he’d spent 32 years building and maintaining. The vote had made him so mad he’d written a three-page handwritten letter to the council that he’d never sent, too stubborn to deal with what he’d assumed was just another out-of-touch politician who didn’t care about the town’s public land. She was wearing faded denim cutoff shorts, scuffed steel-toe work boots, and a ratty National Park Service hoodie tied around her waist, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid streaked with gray at the temples. She weaved through the crowd, holding a lime seltzer can in one hand, and stopped half a foot in front of him before he could pretend to be on his phone.
She smelled like coconut sunscreen and freshly cut clover, close enough that he could see the faint smattering of freckles across her nose and the chip in her front left tooth from a hiking accident she’d posted about on the town Facebook page. “Ray Voss,” she said, holding out her free hand, her grip firm, calloused on the palm. “I’ve been trying to track you down for weeks.” He didn’t take his hand out of his jeans pocket. He nodded at the council logo stitched to her t-shirt, jaw tight. “Came to gloat about killing the backcountry trails?” She winced, and when she gestured with her seltzer can to explain, a splash of the fizzy liquid sloshed over the edge and onto the cuff of his gray flannel shirt. She swore, grabbing a crumpled napkin from her back pocket, and leaned in to dab at the wet spot, her knuckles brushing his forearm as she worked. The contact was so unexpected he flinched, half from surprise, half from the jolt of warmth that shot up his arm from where her skin touched his.
She held up both hands in surrender when he stepped back, the napkin still in her hand. “That vote wasn’t what you think,” she said, and she didn’t have that fake, tight smile every other politician in town wore when they were lying. She explained the council had buried the fine print: the “cuts” were reallocating funds from the unused, mold-ridden visitor center budget to repair 17 miles of eroded backcountry trails and add accessibility ramps to the three most popular overlook spots, the same ramps Ray had been begging the council to approve for 10 years. He’d only seen the sensationalized headline in the local paper, never bothered to read the full meeting minutes, too used to the council letting him down. He felt like an idiot. He apologized for being a jerk, offered to buy her a beer to make up for it.
She nodded toward the trailhead half a mile from the fairgrounds, the first stretch of the trail system he’d built back in 1991. “Wanna go see the new ramp they finished last week?” she asked, tilting her head, her dark eyes glinting in the sunset. He hesitated. He hadn’t walked any of the trails with another person since his wife died, hadn’t let anyone get that close to the parts of his life that still felt like they belonged only to her. But Mara was already standing, holding out her hand to him, her palm up, and he found himself taking it, letting her pull him up off the bench. The gravel crunched under their boots as they walked, fireflies flickering in the tall grass on either side of the path, the noise of the fest fading behind them. She didn’t let go of his hand when they stepped over a gnarled oak root halfway up the trail, her fingers laced through his, warm and calloused.
