Chapter 5
Five
Elise
When I slip back into the guest room, my clothes are clean—folded, even—on the chair by the window. I stop and stare like the denim might explain itself. I’ve only been here overnight. How did Simone get even my sweater washed, dried, and folded in the span of a few hours?
I bring the sweater to my face. It smells faintly of some expensive detergent I don’t recognize—clean, almost citrusy. A little piece of this house clings to the fibers. A little piece of Kingston’s world wraps around me as I dress.
Boots. Coat. Gloves. Hat. Back downstairs, I layer up until I feel like a walking duvet and step outside into air so cold it steals my breath.
The storm faded away at some point this morning, and the sun is finally shining.
But as I walk out to the vines, the snow is knee deep, heavy and wet, clinging to my boots like it wants to keep me here.
The vines rise in quiet rows as I approach, cloaked in snow, black ribs against a white sky, their fragile arms not yet sprouted.
I brush snow from a spur, run my thumb along the wood, and listen the way my dad taught me, noticing how sound feels through my skin.
Some of these may not make it. Some can be coaxed back.
The blanket of snow might have bought them a chance.
Water’s cruel, but it can be merciful too. Hope is stubborn like that. So am I.
The truck looks worse in daylight—three tires swallowed to the rims in frozen mud.
I dig around them anyway, breath puffing in angry little clouds.
The shovel’s handle burns through my gloves, and the metal clinks against rock.
I scrape, pry, curse under my breath. After ten solid minutes, I’ve made exactly the kind of progress that makes me want to throw the shovel like a spear.
“Great,” I mutter, leaning on the handle. “You win.” The truck ignores me, smug in its pit. There’s a reason Kingston told me not to bother today.
I force myself to look somewhere, anywhere else.
When I turn, the lake does what it always does and hushes me.
It’s a sheet of glass, steel, and pearl under a sky the color of pewter, the banks softened by a frosting of snow.
A long-ago memory flickers—skates biting into ice on the pond by the main house.
Kingston and Tarryn racing, me wobbling after them, cheeks burning, breath hot inside my scarf.
Back then, the world was simple. Vines and math homework.
Sunday dinners with dad and harvests. No exchange programs, no leaving, no burgeoning career, no wondering whether I belong to land or people or neither.
Movement catches my eye, a dark figure bent and repetitive against a drift. Kingston. He’s shoveling like he’s in a contest he refuses to lose.
Curiosity, or maybe some stubborn desire to be useful, drags me toward him. Every step is a negotiation with the snow. By the time I reach the clearing, my thighs burn and my lungs sting.
“Need help?” I call, voice swallowed by the quiet, my words coming out in visible puffs.
He doesn’t stop, just straightens enough to lean on the shovel. “If I don’t clear this, we don’t fly.”
My gaze skates across white nothing. “Clear…what? You’re shoveling a pad of concrete?”
“Doors,” he says, stamping his boot on the packed surface. “The helicopter platform sits below ground. Doors open inward. If I don’t get this snow off, all of it drops into the bay the second I release the locks.”
Ah. Not a magical billionaire dome after all. Just two giant steel doors pretending to be ground.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if the platform was heated?” I ask. Teasing him is a reflex I’ve had longer than my driver’s license.
His mouth twitches like he wants to smile but refuses. “Already on the punch list.” He thumbs the starter on a snowblower.
It coughs, growls, and dies the saddest death I’ve ever heard a machine die. “Too wet,” I say.
“Too heavy,” he agrees, jaw ticking. “And I didn’t get the front blade swapped after the last storm.”
My eyes find a wide push broom leaning against the equipment shed, bristles splayed from honest years of work. “Well, if your toy won’t do the job…” I grab the broom, set my feet, and bulldoze a swath of snow off the seam where the doors meet.
He looks deeply unimpressed. “That’s pointless.”
“Try the snow blower where I just cleared,” I say, breathless but delighted by my own pettiness.
He humors me. The blower bites. The snow breaks clean. His brows lift a millimeter, which for Kingston is the emotional equivalent of confetti and a marching band. “Hmm…” he says.
“Translation: you were wrong,” I inform him.
“It helped,” he counters, which is as close to a capitulation as I’ll ever get.
We fall into an easy, word-sparring rhythm—me pushing broad lanes, him shaving the stubborn edges.
The work is monotonous and brutal, and I measure time by the ache that creeps into my forearms, the damp that seeps through the knees of my jeans, and the way my scarf goes from dry wool to a chilled, damp rope pressed against my neck.
Every so often our gloves bump on a handle exchange, and there’s a jolt that isn’t static electricity. I ignore it. Or I try to.
“You enjoy being right way too much,” he says eventually, which makes something bright unfurl under my ribs.
“Someone has to keep you humble.”
“Medical conferences usually do the trick,” he says dryly.
“So you’re saying I’m as effective as a ballroom full of orthopedic surgeons?” I ask, pushing another heavy drift. My boots slip, and he steadies me with a hand at my elbow. Heat explodes across my skin under the insulation, which is ridiculous in this refrigerator of a morning.
“You’re louder,” he says.
“I’m not loud,” I protest, even though I absolutely am when the situation calls for it.
He glances up, and there’s a flash of amusement—Kingston unguarded, boyish for a heartbeat. I look away so fast my neck twinges.
We work until the world narrows to scrape, sweep, pant, repeat. When the last of the heavy snow has finally been driven away and the black seam of the doors lies clear like a precise incision, I straighten and groan, pressing a palm to my lower back.
“Okay,” I gasp. “That was…not glamorous.”
“Effective, though,” he says.
He taps something into a recessed keypad housed in a stainless box that probably cost more than that truck I’ve buried in the mud.
Locks thud. Metal groans. Somewhere below us, hydraulics whir to life, a steady, hungry sound that reverberates through my boots.
The twin doors split down the center and fold inward, swallowing their own weight like slow jaws.
Beneath, the platform rises—first a sliver of dark, then a widening circle, then sleek carbon fiber and glass and the knife-clean lines of a machine that looks like it should not be real.
The Sikorsky S-76D helicopter lifts into the morning like a secret surfacing. It’s bone-dry, rotors tied down with neat red straps, paint gleaming, windows reflecting sky and me—pink-cheeked, hair plastered to my forehead, ridiculous.
“There,” Kingston says as he keys in a short series on a second panel. The platform locks with a reassuring clunk. “She’s ready.”
“That is so amazing. You hide your helicopter.”
“This way,” he says, “no one messes with her. I still need to do all the regular checks, but I was in her yesterday coming from the airport in Paradise.” He concludes with a look that is ninety-percent deadpan and ten-percent warning.
I laugh and immediately regret it when the cold stabs my exposed teeth.
We slog back toward the house, leaving deep proof of our work in the snow.
I can feel every muscle from hip to ankle registering a formal complaint.
My jeans are again soaked through, my coat heavy with wetness, and my gloves iced into claws.
The mudroom door swings open before I can touch the handle, and warmth rolls out in a blessed wave.
“Stop right there,” Simone says, blocking the threshold with an arm that could halt a stampede. She evaluates both of us in one sweep, eyes sharp. “Absolutely not. You’re not dripping on my floor.”
“Your floor?” Kingston says, but it’s soft around the edges, no real heat.
“Mine,” she says. “By virtue of caring about it. Boots off. Coats on hooks. You—” She flicks a glance at me. “—come with me. I’ve got something that’ll fit you better than whatever you wore last night.”
“Simone,” I manage through chattering teeth. “You’re a saint.”
She snorts. “I’m a house manager who hates puddles. Move.”
Kingston disappears deeper into the house without waiting to be dismissed, though he does remove his shoes.
Typical. Simone rolls her eyes at his retreating back, then slides a large boot tray under my feet and waits the way only someone with older-sister energy can—hand on hip, eyebrow up, patient and terrifying.
Once I’ve shed enough water to irrigate a small field, she shepherds me down the hall to a bright room, rummages in a closet, and emerges with black leggings and an oversized slate sweatshirt.
“They’ll be a little big,” she says, “but closer than that man’s castoffs.” She pushes them into my arms. “Shower, warm up, and meet me in the kitchen. I’ll make hot chocolate for both of you.”
Hot chocolate. My bones sing at the very phrase. “You’re serious?”
“I don’t joke about chocolate,” she says, already turning away. “And Elise? Great to see you on this side of the lake.”
Something tender loosens in my heart. “You too.”
In the bathroom, I peel off wet layers that slap the tile like fish.
I turn the water hotter than any dermatologist would approve, step into the hiss and steam, and stand there until the sting softens into a slow, encompassing heat.
Sensation creeps back into my fingers in painful pins and needles.
I brace my hands against the tiles and bow my head, letting the water drum between my shoulder blades.