Ranger

I could have called Russ after the second visit instead of the third.

I don't know if it would have changed anything.

Russ says it wouldn't have.

He says by the time I had enough to act on, I acted, and that anybody who says otherwise doesn't understand how this kind of predator operates.

I believe him on most days.

The second thing...

People ask me sometimes what I think he was going to do if he'd gotten into the tower that night, or into the cabin.

I don't answer that question.

Some of the possibilities are the kind of thing I would rather not say out loud.

Most of them end with me being one of the names in a file that gets reopened 20 years later because somebody finally reports a man harassing a lookout on a peak.

I'm not one of those names.

I'm sitting here telling you this instead.

That's the part I try to hold on to.

On the days when I can't sleep, on the days when I think about the calendar, on the days when I look out a window at a tree line somewhere and my body tenses up without me telling it to.

That's the part I come back to.

I am the one telling the story.

He is in a concrete building in a town I have never visited and he is going to be there for a while.

And when he gets out, I will know.

I will have prepared.

I prepared once before.