4. Jakob #2
She wraps both hands around the tin and brings it to her face and inhales the steam with her eyes closed, and something about the gesture, the deliberateness of it, the way she holds the warmth against her skin before she even takes a sip, tells me she's a person who notices small comforts.
Who catalogues them. Who maybe hasn't had enough of them to take them for granted.
I lean against the wall with my own mug and study her over the rim.
The fire is building now and the home is warming and in the shifting light the bruise-colored circles under her eyes look deep enough to hold water.
She doesn't look like someone who was on her way to a vacation.
She looks like someone running from a fire that already burned through everything she had.
"Burnout," I say. Not a question. She mentioned it during her nervous reorganization of my kitchen, words spilling out of her like she couldn't plug the leak. Something about a marketing firm and eighty-hour weeks and a performance review that made her cry in a parking garage.
Her eyes open. She looks at me over the mug, surprised, like she didn't expect me to have been listening.
"Yeah. My therapist called it 'acute occupational exhaustion' which sounds very clinical and important, but basically I stopped sleeping and started having panic attacks at my desk and my hair was falling out in the shower.
" She laughs, a brittle sound with no joy behind it.
"So. You know. Self-care retreat. That was the plan. "
"Hair fell out."
"Not all of it. Just, like, clumps? In the drain? My roommate thought I was dying." She takes a sip of tea and winces at the strength of it but doesn't complain. "I wasn't dying. I was just really, really good at my job and really, really bad at knowing when to stop doing my job."
The fire pops. A log shifts and settles and sends a shower of sparks against the glass. I drink my tea and let the silence sit because silence is a tool and most people can't tolerate it. They fill it. She fills it.
"I ran the social media accounts for three Fortune 500 companies simultaneously.
And I managed a team of twelve. And I was on call basically twenty-four-seven because that's what you do when you're twenty-four and your boss tells you this is what paying your dues looks like.
" She stares into the mug. "I was really proud of that.
I was so proud of how much I could carry. "
"And then?"
She glances up, startled again. Like she keeps forgetting I'm capable of speech.
"And then I had a panic attack during a client presentation.
Full audience. Screens and projectors and a room full of executives in very expensive suits watching me hyperventilate into a paper bag that someone's assistant found in a trash can.
" She takes another sip. Sets the mug down on the stovetop with a small, precise click.
"I went on medical leave the next day. Three months later I'm still on it, I've stopped wearing my engagement ring, my company has already replaced me, and I realized I don't actually have a life outside that job.
" No hobbies. No real friends outside the office.
My apartment has no art on the walls because I was never there long enough to notice. "
She says all of this with a matter-of-fact steadiness that is worse than if she'd cried.
There's a distance in her, a practiced detachment, and I recognize that too.
The way a person sounds when they've told their trauma story enough times that the words have lost their edges.
It doesn't mean the wound is healed. It means the wound has gone numb.
I set my mug down. "You going back?"
Not a question, the way I say it. More like a door she has to walk through one direction or the other.
"I don't know." She pulls at a loose thread on the rolled sleeve of my shirt.
"That's the honest answer. I don't know.
The company wants me back. They sent flowers to my apartment, which was hilarious because I think they Googled 'what to send someone you broke' and the internet said flowers.
And my mom keeps saying I should be grateful because the benefits are good and the salary is good and she didn't raise a quitter. "
"Your mother's wrong."
Her eyes widen. She looks at me fully now, her whole body turning toward me, and in the growing warmth of the stove her cheeks have some color back and her eyes are clear and sharp and something in them fractures open. "What?"
"Knowing when to walk away isn't quitting." I hold her gaze because the words matter and I need her to hear them, not in the noise of everyone else who's been talking at her. "It's the hardest call there is."
She stares at me. Her lips part. The firelight moves across her face and I can see her working through what I said, testing it against the guilt and obligation that someone built inside her, and for one second the detachment cracks all the way through and what's underneath is raw and young and desperate to believe me.
Then she blinks, and the composure slides back into place like a shield, and she picks up her mug and drinks.
But her hand is shaking.
I want to break something. Not the mug and not the stove and not any object in this cabin.
I want to break the machine that took this woman and fed her through its gears until her hair fell out and her lungs forgot how to work.
I want to find the boss who told a twenty-four-year-old that bleeding for a corporation was the price of admission and I want to explain, in terms he'd understand immediately, how fundamentally wrong he was.
I don't say any of that. I pour her more tea. I put another log in the stove. I sit down on the floor with my back against the wall because the chair is too far from the heat and because from down here I'm closer to her level and she doesn't have to crane her neck to look at me.
She sits too, lowering herself to the floorboards with my flannel tucked under her thighs, and for a while we just drink tea in the warmth of a fire that I built and a silence that, for the first time in four years, doesn't feel like mine alone.
The tea runs out. The kettle goes dry. The fire is the only conversation left and it's starting to repeat itself, the same low crackle and tick of expanding iron, and Kinsley's head keeps dipping forward and snapping back up like a bird fighting sleep on a wire.
Third time it happens she jerks so hard she sloshes the dregs of her empty mug against her chin and wipes it with the heel of her hand and looks at me with glassy, half-focused eyes.
"I think I'm broken."
"You're tired."
"Same thing."
It's not, but I don't argue. I stand, take the mug from her hands, and set both cups on the shelf.
The building is holding temperature now, the woodstove radiating steady heat in a ten-foot circle, but outside that radius the cold is serious.
I can feel it banking against the walls, pressing at the windows, seeping through every gap between the logs that I haven't gotten around to recaulking.
The generator is dead until I can assess it in daylight, which means no baseboard heat, no electric blankets, nothing between us and the mountain's forty-degree breath except the stove and whatever insulation I can pile on.
The floor is out. Even if I dragged every spare blanket off the shelf and built a nest thick enough to sleep on, the drafts run along the baseboards like invisible rivers of ice water.
I know because I spent my first winter up here sleeping on the floor while I finished the bed frame, and I woke every morning with a back so locked up it took twenty minutes of movement before I could stand straight.
For me, that's a bad night. For a woman half my size with no body fat and a core temperature that only stabilized an hour ago, it's a medical risk.
One bed. Mine. Built wide because I built it for a man who takes up space, heavy pine frame with a mattress I hauled up the mountain in the back of my truck and a set of wool blankets thick enough to stop a blade. Plenty of room for two people if both people are reasonable about it.
I move the blankets back. "Get in."
She's still on the floor by the stove, legs curled beneath her, blinking at me. "Where are you sleeping?"
"Same place."
The alarm wins. She straightens up, the flannel shirt riding above her knees, and I keep my eyes on the wall behind her. "I'm sorry, what?"
"Floor's too cold. Generator's dead. Storm's not breaking before morning." I smooth the bottom sheet, fold the top blanket down in a clean line. "Body heat is the most efficient thermal source in an enclosed space. It's physics."
"It's a pickup line is what it is."
I look at her. She's got her arms crossed over her and her chin up and even half-dead with exhaustion she's ready to fight me on this and something about that, the stubbornness, the refusal to just do the logical thing because the logical thing involves a stranger's bed, makes the corner of my mouth want to move in a direction it hasn't moved in years. I don't let it.
"I'll build a wall."
"A wall."
I grab the two spare pillows from the top shelf of the closet and a rolled wool blanket and lay them down on the mattress in a straight line, pillow, folded blanket, pillow.
A barrier. A demarcation. The kind of thing a man builds when he needs a physical boundary to enforce the one his brain is already losing control of.
I step back and look at it and it's absurd, a pillow fort built by a two-hundred-and-forty-pound combat veteran, but it's there and it's solid and it sends a message.
"Your side." I point left. "My side." I point right. "The wall stays. You stay on your side. I stay on mine."