The first thing I see when I wake several hours later is the half-empty liquor bottle on the floor beside the sofa, my socks balled up on the coffee table. Behind my eyes, my hangover pulses, spangled. If Hap were here, he’d be concerned to see me drinking so much. He’d also be dressed already, face washed, coffee on the boil. He loved mornings and late nights, too. Sometimes I wondered if he slept at all, but it was comforting to think he was always there if I needed him, awake and at the ready. I wish that were still true.

I dress in layers, feeling the top button of my jeans sinking into the soft flesh at my waist, my fingertips grazing the puckered skin, like fresh scar tissue. I pull my hair back without checking my reflection and then fill my thermos with coffee before bolting the cabin door behind me and heading back toward the village.

When I reach the coast road, I turn the car north toward Caspar and Jug Handle Creek, a favorite place of Hap’s for day hikes. When I was eleven, Hap and many of the rangers he worked with joined up with local activists to protect the bluffs from logging and real estate development—and they won. A legacy the entire area was proud of. Hap was only twenty when he first started working for the U.S. Forest Service, rising through the ranks until he became lead warden not long after I came to live with them, with oversight over dozens of rangers and fifty thousand acres of federally owned land.

His was a big job and sometimes a dangerous one. The stories he told were full of hunting accidents and hikers in dire straits, of teenagers pulled blue and lifeless from hidden quarries. He knew what an aggressive black bear could do to a man, and what men could do to one another out in that boundlessness.

Over the eight years I lived in Mendocino with the Straters, I became Hap’s student and sidekick, his shadow. At first I didn’t understand why he would want to spend so much time with me, or why he and Eden had taken me on to begin with. I’d already bounced through half a dozen homes without sticking. Why would this be different? It took time and numerous false starts for me to believe that Hap and Eden were what they appeared to be on the surface, just decent people who meant to be kind because they could. I tested and pushed, trying to goad them into sending me away like everyone else had. Once I ran off and slept in the woods, waiting to see if Hap would come and look for me. When he did, I thought he’d be angry or fed up with my nonsense, but he wasn’t. He only looked at me, damp and bedraggled, shivering from my night on the ground.