Lily was certain she wouldn’t sleep. Her mental review of every step she’d taken up on the mountain—every physical sign she’d assessed, every med she’d administered, every decision she’d made—was only the beginning. She’d search for what she had failed to do, even knowing far too well that sometimes there was nothing she could do. That postmortem would have kept her awake even if the strangeness of her surroundings and the faint sound of Chase’s footsteps in the other room weren’t enough to drive any remnant of fatigue away. Still, she was glad she’d come here and not gone back to the lodge, where she would be lying in a bed nearly as strange as this one, without the stirring of excitement of being near Chase. Smiling at that thought, surprised as always that a near-constant state of arousal could also be so delicious, she closed her eyes. Even the semblance of rest would be better than none.

When she opened them again, her unerring internal clock told her she’d slept till an hour before dawn. Close to four.

She rolled over to check her phone out of habit: 3:57.

She might be in a world very different than her own, but her body still worked the same. So did she. Somewhere in the hours she’d been asleep, her mind had settled the issue of what had gone on the night before. She’d told the students the truth—they’d all done everything they could.

The cabin was not completely silent. Things that she hoped were acorns or stout twigs clattered on the roof. Those sounds certainly weren’t the skittering of little feet. She eyed the window as a distant woof that probably didn’t emanate from a Labrador sounded quite clearly. And close. The top of the window was down six inches, letting a breeze in, but hopefully nothing more. The screen might keep mosquitoes out but wouldn’t provide much of a barrier to anything else. Her heart raced for a second and then settled. She’d had almost a month to get used to the night sounds in the mountains, and to appreciate that the wildlife had no more interest in running into her than she did with them. This land, which a few weeks ago she’d considered completely foreign, had become familiar in so many ways, and she was no longer a stranger in a strange land.