Caroline
I hold the phone in my frozen fingers and I make a decision.
I put it back.
Not because I forgive him—I don't, not yet. The forgiveness is going to require a conversation, some yelling, and possibly a PowerPoint presentation titled A Mountain Man's Guide to Groveling.
But right now, there is a four-inch furrow seeping through this man's side, and the lecture can wait until he isn't gray as the snow.
I find the first aid kit and clean the wound. I press butterfly closures across the worst of it the way he showed me, then I tape fresh gauze over the whole mess while Afon pretends he isn't shaking.
We rest an hour or so. I force-feed him handfuls of the last of our dried venison, then we get up and walk the last seven miles.
It's a fever dream, a fugue of snow and a downhill slope so steep that it feels like we're walking into hell.
But it goes. I don't even want to live those the first time through, much less re-live them ever again in my memory.
So I commit to forgetting each step as soon as it happens.
There's only ever the next step. Some experiences are best left undocumented for the dignity of all parties involved.
I will say this: There comes a point, somewhere in the white howling nothing, when I stop feeling my feet and start having a very calm, very reasonable internal conversation about whether it would be so bad to just lie down.
And it's Afon's voice snarling, "No. Eyes up.
Look at me. One more step," that keeps me upright.
So we don't get to talk about who saved who. Not on this mountain.
The mountain demands a draw.
Pike Hollow appears out of the storm like a hallucination.
First, there's the Sunoco sign, glowing radioactive red-and-yellow through the snow. Then the dark hump of the bait shop. Then the bench—the scene of the crime, where a white van once swallowed me whole—now wearing a foot of fresh powder.
And then, across the street, a lit window. It's steamed up from the inside, golden, with a hand-painted sign above it that reads PIKE HOLLOW DINER and, underneath, in smaller letters that have clearly been added by a different and more passive-aggressive hand, OPEN WHEN OPEN.
I have never wanted anything so badly in my entire life.
"Is that—" My voice comes out as a frozen croak. "Afon. Is that a diner?"
He stops and frowns. "Looks like it." He looks down at me and attempts a smile, though his lips are so wind-chapped that they crack and bleed. "Do you think they serve beans?"
Laughing deliriously, chaotically, I drag him toward it. Wolf lopes ahead like he, too, has decided that the Hollow Diner is the promised land.
Afon opens the door. A little bell jingles, and we step inside.
Heat.
Sweet, blessed heat hits me like the embrace of a benevolent god.
And my goodness, is that electricity?! There's a counter with chrome stools, vinyl booths the color of old mustard, a pie case turning slowly in the corner like the most beautiful merry-go-round ever built, and a smell—oh, the smell—coffee and bacon grease and frying onions, the holy trinity of civilization.
I whine like Wolf.
"Well, there now." A woman appears from behind the counter, wearing a quilted vest with a name tag that says BARB.
Barb! I almost cry out. We've never met, but I love you, Barb!
Barb of the town, Barb of the post office, Barb who was at the dentist the day I got kidnapped.
Barb, my hero, Barb, the patron saint of Pike Hollow.
"Look what the storm blew in. You two come down off the mountain? "
"Yes," I say, with feeling. "Yes, we did."
"Lordy. In this?"
She comes around the counter, taking us in. We must look awful. Me half-collapsed and crusted in snow, Afon hulking and bleeding through a sweater he's keeping turned away from her line of sight. I'm impressed that she doesn't banish us right back out like the ghouls we are.
"Sit, sit," she says. "Anywhere you want. It's not like we're packed." She gestures at the mostly empty diner, where one other customer occupies a stool at the counter, a man in a trapper hat who has not turned around. "Coffee?"
"If you brought me a cup of coffee right now," I tell her, lowering myself into a booth, "I would name my firstborn child after you."
Barb cackles. "Honey, you're frozen stupid. Sit tight. Coffee's coming."
Afon slides in across from me, careful with his side, his back to the wall and his eyes on the door.
Under the fluorescent lights, away from the snow and the trees, he looks wrong.
Too big for the booth. Too still. Like a predator someone shoved into an IHOP.
Watching him warily squint at the pie case like it might be concealing unknown enemies, I feel the most absurd surge of tenderness toward him.
Maybe the sat phone is nothing I need to worry about. I'm probably overthinking it. Even if I try, I can't summon the rage, the confusion, the hurt I felt in that lean-to.
It's beyond doubt that this man would do anything, anything at all, to protect me. He's bleeding and frozen stiff, but he is still my protector. He turned his whole quiet, careful life inside out because I stumbled into his clearing and refused to leave.
Did he ask for me? No.
Is he stuck with me? Yes.
Would he go to the ends of the earth to keep me safe and warm and free? Hell. Fucking. Yes.
I don't know what's coming next. But God help me, I want to face it with him.
"You okay?" I ask.
He forces himself to smile. "Thriving."
Barb arrives with two mugs and a full carafe. I immediately guzzle down an entire mug without pausing for breath. It is the single greatest beverage I have ever consumed, including a two-hundred-dollar bottle of Burgundy a federal judge once opened for the clerks.
Burgundy can eat my entire ass. This is coffee.
"Slow down, you'll hurt yourself," Afon says.
"You don't get to lecture me about hurting myself. You walked seven miles with a hole in you." I pour myself a second mug and tap the menu in front of him. "Order something. You need calories. You lost blood."
He orders when Barb comes back. "Eggs. Toast. Whatever's hot."
I get a cheeseburger, fries, a side of bacon, a short stack of pancakes. When Barb's eyebrows go up, I tell her, "It's been a week, Barb," and she pats my shoulder and says, "Say no more, sweetheart."
While we wait, I thaw. The feeling comes back into my feet, which is its own special kind of agony, like my toes are being reintroduced to the concept of existence and resent it.
The trapper-hat man finally turns around, gives us a long look, and announces to no one in particular, "Snowmobiles all up and down the county roads today. Damn fools."
Afon's hand goes still around his mug. "That so?" he says.
"Heard 'em myself. Out by the old quarry." The man shakes his head. "Tourists. Or worse." He turns back to his pie.
The food comes, accompanied by a chorus of heavenly angels. Well, that might be my imagination—the angels, not the food. The food is very, very real.
I eat like the universe might snatch it away from me at any second. Afon eats his eggs slowly and methodically, but I notice he doesn't leave a crumb, which tells me he was hungrier than he'd ever admit.
Halfway through the short stack, I am a new woman. I am resurrected. I have feet again and blood sugar and the capacity for joy.
"Barb," I call. "Barb, this is the best meal I've ever had. Are you by chance single? Would you like to get married?"
"Aw, hush, you flirt." She refills my coffee, beaming.
She's been hovering near our booth on and off, clearly starved for conversation in an empty diner during a blizzard.
I'm more than happy to provide it, because I have missed people, I have missed chatter, the simple pleasures of human-to-human connection.
I have spent a week with a man who communicates primarily through grunts and a dog who communicates primarily through flatulence. I deserve a little yap.
"You folks staying up at one of the cabins?" she asks. "We don't get many through here this time of year."
"Something like that," I say vaguely. I side-eye Afon, who nods subtly, approving of my lack of specificity.
"Long way to come in the off-season." She tilts her head, eyeing the two of us with the frank, unbothered nosiness of a woman who has run the only diner in a town of four hundred for thirty years and answers to no one. "You two been up there long? Just the two of you?"
"About a week," I reply.
"Well, isn't that romantic?" Barb sighs, a hand pressed to her quilted chest. "A week snowed in together. My Gerald, rest him, wouldn't have lasted a day with me without somebody getting brained with a skillet." She looks between us and grins slyly. "How long have you two been married?"
I wince.
But…
… I don't correct her.
I should. The only honest answer is of fucking course we're not. But when she says it, I just… I dunno.
I squirm inside. A little involuntary squiggle of joy.
And for as long as I'm squiggling like that, I'm picturing things, too.
Another cabin, a new one. Wolf and maybe a little puppy friend for company.
A warm fire. A woodpile that stays full because of the handsome, shirtless, bearded lumberjack of a husband swinging his ax in the front yard.
A kitchen blessedly devoid of beans. A crib with—
"We're not together."
Afon's voice is like a guillotine blade slamming into the chopping block.
Just like that, the squiggle dies.
Barb's smile falters. "Oh—I just figured—"
"You figured wrong."
I look at him as hot tears suddenly fill my eyes.
But he's not looking at me. He's looking at Barb with that concrete-poured-over-the-face expression, the one I haven't seen since the morning he loaded me into the Bronco and drove me to that bench.
Barb, bless her, just nods and says, "Course.
None of my business. More coffee, hon?" and retreats behind the counter.
When she's gone, the easy golden warmth of the room curdles.
I look down at my short stack. The maple syrup has gone tacky around the edges.
It shouldn't sting. It's true. We're not together. There's a story standing between us, and a wedding ring he won't take off, and a number in a phone he kept secret while I starved.
We are not, by any legal or technical definition, together.
I knew all that thirty seconds ago. But I still felt that stupid little flutter when Barb said married, and now, I feel like an idiot, because of course Afon didn't feel it.
He heard married and reached for the nearest blunt instrument to murder that insane, inane fantasy.
That's what he does, that's what he's done at every turn: He opens the door halfway and then slams it, kisses me senseless and then says not like this, holds my hand over the ring and then keeps a lifeline secret from me in his pocket.
We're not together.
No, Afon.
I suppose we're not.
I drink my coffee. It's gone cold and it doesn't taste like resurrection anymore.
Across the table, Afon shifts. I can feel him looking at me. I keep my eyes on my plate.
"Caroline."
"It's fine."
"That came out—"
"It came out true. We're not together. You're right.
" I stab a fork into the cold pancake. "You're so right.
We are two people who got snowed in. One of us is a former assassin and one of us is a domestic violence attorney from the Upper East Side, and we are certainly not together.
I don't know what came over Barb, frankly, getting all carried away like that.
People should mind their own business. It's honestly a little rude of her. "
"Caroline, I—"
"I said it's fine, Afon. Drop it."
The worst part is that I mean it, mostly, I'm just also aware that there's a wet heat building behind my eyes that has nothing to do with thawing out, and I'd really rather not cry in the Hollow Diner in front of Barb and the random trapper-hat man on the best food day of my life.
Afon is quiet. He turns his mug a quarter rotation on the laminate. "I didn't say it to hurt you."
"I know why you said it."
"I don't think you do."
I look up at that. He's watching me with a guarded expression.
"Then enlighten me," I say.
He hesitates. His thumb finds the bronze band, twists it once around his finger, and I watch him decide, in real time, that this is not the moment. Tonight, he'll say, but why would I believe that? Tonight never comes.
"Not here," he says finally.
I nod. "Of course not."
"But—"
"No, you're right. Not here. Not now. Never now." I push the cold plate away. "There's always a reason. I know."
The bell over the door jingles, and we both go rigid. Afon's hand drops below the table, mine grips the edge of the booth.
But it's just an old woman in a parka coming in out of the storm, stamping snow off her boots, calling out, "Barb! You believe this weather?" and the moment passes, the danger that wasn't.
Through the window, Wolf is still under the awning, nose pressed to the glass, watching us with his big patient brown eyes, the only member of this party who has never once been confused about how he feels.
"We can't stay long," Afon says. "The man heard snowmobiles by the quarry. They're casting wide. We need to move before—"
"I know."
He sighs. "Alright. Well… stay here. I need to make a call."
I look at him and wonder just what the hell is going through his head right now. As always, it's a mystery to me.
"Okay," I say. "Then make your call, Afon."
I pull Barb's carafe across the table and pour myself one more cup, because I've earned it, because it's warm, and because in a minute, we're going to walk back out into the white, wild, dangerous winter.
But until that minute ends, I'd like to sit in this toasty room and pretend that we're the kind of people Barb thought we were.