Chapter Thirty-Six Snow in Switzerland
The chalet sat at the edge of a small village high enough in the Alps that the air itself felt thinner and cleaner, wood-smoke and pine drifting up from chimneys scattered across the valley, the Matterhorn presiding over all of it like something too enormous to be entirely real.
Jennie stood on the small balcony of their room that first evening, wrapped in every layer she owned and several she’d borrowed from Lin Xing, and simply stared.
“I’ve never seen mountains like this,” she said, when he came to stand behind her, arms sliding around her waist against the cold.
“We have mountains at home. The Western Ghats. They’re beautiful.
They’re not — this isn’t the same category of beautiful.
” “It’s an entirely different unit of measurement,” he agreed, chin resting against her hair.
“I looked up the elevation before we left. I found the number difficult to hold in my head properly until just now.” “Are you cold?” “Extremely. I refuse to go inside first.” “That’s a very stubborn honeymoon strategy.
” “I contain multitudes,” he said, borrowing her own old line so smoothly she laughed out loud, the sound carrying off into the enormous, snow-muffled quiet of the valley.
They’d arrived that afternoon, exhausted in the specific way that came from a wedding week spanning three countries, two hemispheres, and — by Jennie’s rough count — at least fourteen separate relatives crying at various points for various reasons.
The plan for the week, insofar as either of them had made one, was simple: nothing.
No hospital pagers. No wedding logistics.
No group calls demanding opinions on gold thread. Just snow, and each other, and however many days it took to remember what quiet actually felt like. It took, as it turned out, almost no time at all.
That first night, after dinner in the village — fondue, which Lin Xing approached with the suspicion of a man being asked to trust communal cheese — they came back to the chalet to find the fire already lit, the room golden with it, snow ticking softly against the dark windows.
Jennie stood by the hearth pulling the pins from her hair, and felt him come up behind her, felt his hands settle at her waist with none of the old carefulness — certain now, his mouth finding the curve of her neck with a slow deliberateness that emptied her head of every thought she had been about to have.
“Mrs. Lin,” he murmured against her skin, testing the shape of it — and then paused, a small frown arriving against her neck.
Jennie started laughing before he said a single word.
“You’re thinking about the fondue.” “I am not thinking about the fondue.” “Lin. I felt you frown.” “The cheese-to-wine ratio was scientifically indefensible, and I will be writing the establishment a—” She turned in his arms and kissed him mid-sentence, properly — deep and unhurried, his fingers tangling in her loosened hair, her hands sliding beneath his sweater to the warm plane of his back, the two of them swaying slightly, like the wedding dance had never quite ended.
“Dr. Jennie,” she corrected, breathless, against his mouth.
“Professionally.” “Of course. Forgive me.” He drew back just far enough to look at her, firelight moving in his eyes, and whatever he found in her face made him abandon the last of his composure entirely.
He kissed her again — deeper this time, no measurement left in it anywhere — and walked her slowly backward toward the bed, and the fire burned down to embers with no one left tending it at all.
Much later, tangled and warm beneath the heavy duvet, her head on his chest and his heartbeat steady under her ear, Jennie decided that of all the vows they had made across three countries, her favorite was the one nobody had witnessed at all — spoken low in the dark, in the language of hands and breath, until they both fell asleep mid-sentence.
“I want to learn to ski,” Jennie announced the next morning, over a breakfast of bread and cheese and coffee strong enough to wake the dead. “I’ve never seen real snow before this trip. I want the full experience.” “I’ve skied twice,” Lin Xing said.
“Both times in medical school, both times supervised by a colleague who assured me it was ‘basically walking.’ It was not, in fact, basically walking.” “So you’re an expert.” “I am the opposite of an expert. I am a cautionary tale with a working knowledge of orthopedic injuries.”
He came anyway, because he’d apparently decided somewhere over the Atlantic that the whole point of this particular week was saying yes to things, and by ten that morning they stood at the base of the beginner slope, rented skis feeling entirely foreign underfoot, a very patient instructor named Marco explaining the basic mechanics with the weary calm of a man who had clearly seen every possible way this could go wrong.
Jennie, it turned out, had a natural, reckless confidence for it — fell twice in the first ten minutes, laughed both times, and by noon was making it down the gentle slope with something approaching actual competence.
Lin Xing approached it the way he approached everything: methodically, with excessive preparation, asking Marco detailed follow-up questions about center of gravity and weight distribution that Marco answered with visibly growing bemusement.
He fell, spectacularly, four times in the first twenty minutes.
“You’re overthinking it,” Jennie called, skiing an easy, wobbling circle around him as he lay in the snow for the third time, dignity thoroughly scattered somewhere up the slope behind him. “I am approaching it with appropriate rigor.” “You’re approaching it like a chart. It’s not a chart, Lin.
It’s snow.” “Snow,” he informed her, from flat on his back, “has considerably more variables than most charts.” By the fourth fall, even Marco had started laughing, quietly, behind one gloved hand, and by the fifth — a genuinely impressive tumble that ended with one ski entirely detached and several meters uphill from the rest of him — Lin Xing lay in the snow for a long moment, staring up at the enormous blue sky, and simply started laughing too, helpless and unguarded, the sound so unlike his usual composed self that Jennie skied over immediately, half-worried, half-delighted. “Are you hurt?”
“Only my professional dignity,” he said, still laughing, snow melting rapidly down the back of his jacket. “I believe I have just discovered the one skill set that entirely resists my usual methods. I find it strangely liberating.”
“Dr. Lin Xing, defeated by a beginner slope.” “Dr. Lin Xing,” he corrected, hauling himself upright with her help and immediately sliding sideways again, “defeated by physics, gravity, and his own considerable overconfidence. I accept the diagnosis.”
They gave up on skiing by early afternoon — Lin Xing’s dignity, and one bruised hip, requiring a strategic retreat — and spent the rest of the day instead in the village below, wandering narrow streets lined with wood-shuttered houses, stopping at a small café for hot chocolate so thick it required a spoon.
“This,” Jennie said, licking chocolate off said spoon with real reverence, “might genuinely be the best thing I have ever tasted, and I include in that assessment my mother’s cooking, which she would consider treason if she heard me say it.
” “Don’t tell her. I’d like to remain welcome in that household. ”
“You’re already welcome. You called Appa for permission. You get a lifetime pass.” “I intend to use it sparingly.
I understand from your father that the newspaper archive is a delicate subject.
” They found a small church at the edge of the village, its bell tower visible from nearly every street, and stepped inside more out of habit than plan — the same instinct that had first brought them together on an ordinary Sunday morning, over a year and a lifetime ago.
It was empty at that hour, quiet and cool, afternoon light falling in long colored strips through narrow stained glass.
Jennie lit a candle without quite deciding to, the way she always did, and Lin Xing stood beside her in the particular stillness he reserved now only for the things that mattered most.
“What did you pray for?” he asked, as they stepped back out into the cold. “I never tell. It ruins the magic.” “That’s not how prayer works.”
“It’s exactly how prayer works, if you ask me and not a theologian.” She bumped his shoulder. “What would you have prayed for? If you still did that regularly.”
He considered the question with real care, the way he considered everything that touched his mother, his faith, the guarded rooms he’d spent eleven years building and was still, slowly, learning to let her walk through.
“I think I’d have thanked someone,” he said finally.
“For the fact that I nearly missed all of this.
I spent so long being careful that I came within an inch of never asking a woman to church twice in a row.
I find that thought considerably more frightening now than it did at the time.” “You didn’t miss it, though.”
“No,” he agreed, taking her hand as they walked back up toward the chalet, snow beginning to fall again in slow, fat flakes exactly like the very first winter she’d known him. “I didn’t. I’ve been meaning to thank whoever’s responsible for that. I suppose today was as good a day as any.”
That evening, after dinner — a small, candlelit affair at the chalet’s own restaurant, mercifully free of relatives, spreadsheets, or hospital gossip — they sat together by the fire in their room, the window still holding its view of the mountain, now silvered under a rising moon.
“Can I ask you something?” Jennie said, curled against his side, watching the fire rather than him, which she’d learned over two years was sometimes the easier way to ask him something that mattered. “Always.”
“Do you want children?” He didn’t answer immediately, but she felt something shift in the arm around her — not withdrawal, just the particular stillness of a man giving a real question the weight it deserved.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I’ve wanted to say that for a while and hadn’t found the right moment.
I watch you with the children on the ward, Jennie, and I think — she would be extraordinary at this. Not just good. Extraordinary.” He turned to look at her properly.
“I used to think I’d be too careful a father. Too clinical. I’ve since revised that theory considerably.” “What changed?”
“You did,” he said simply. “I’ve learned, slowly, that being careful and being closed off aren’t the same thing. I think I could be careful with a child the way I’ve learned to be careful with you — attentive, rather than guarded.” A small, private smile.
“I’d like to find out. When you’re ready. There’s no timeline I’m attached to. I’ve become, against all evidence from the first thirty years of my life, a patient man.”
Jennie’s throat went tight, and she pressed her face briefly against his shoulder, letting the fire and the mountain and the enormous, improbable happiness of the day settle fully into her chest. “I want that too,” she said.
“I’ve wanted that for a while too, if I’m honest. I just didn’t want to say it first and put a timeline on something that should feel like an adventure, not an assignment. ”
“An adventure, then,” he said, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “No timeline. Just — soon, I think. Whenever soon arrives on its own.”
“Soon is a real word now,” she said, echoing his own phrase from the cemetery, months earlier, and felt him go still with recognition before he laughed, soft and warm, against her hair. “You remembered that.” “I remember everything you’ve ever said to me. It’s a medical condition.
Incurable.” Her phone buzzed on the side table — Sophia, inevitably, unable to survive more than four days without contact.
Sophia: HOW IS MARRIED LIFE. Send photos. I need proof this is real and not an elaborate hoax. Sophia: also Owen started a NEW pool about how many photos you'll actually send.
I need to win this one. Jennie: we are on a mountain. it’s snowing. Lin Xing fell down five times trying to ski and it was the highlight of my entire year Sophia: FIVE TIMES. Dr Ice.
On the snow. Send video, not photo, VIDEO Jennie: there is no video.
there is only my memory, which I will treasure forever Sophia: this is emotional abuse and I will be filing a complaint Jennie showed him the screen, laughing, and he read it with the long-suffering patience of a man who had, somewhere in the last two years, simply accepted Sophia as a permanent and largely unmanageable weather system.
“I fell five times,” he said. “For the record, I believe it was four.
The fifth was a controlled dismount.” “It was not a controlled dismount, Lin, you screamed.” “I vocalized. There’s a difference.”
She laughed until her sides hurt, curled against him by the fire, snow falling steadily outside the window over a village that had, for one improbable week, become the quietest and fullest place either of them had ever stood still in.
“Thank you,” she said eventually, quieter now, the laughter settling into something warmer underneath it.
“For what, specifically? I’ve done a great many things this week, several of them involuntary and airborne. ”
“For all of it. The mountain. The hot chocolate. Asking my father the old-fashioned way.
Falling down a beginner slope five times just because I wanted to try it.
” She tipped her head back to look at him properly, firelight catching in his eyes.
“For being brave enough, eventually, to stop being so careful.” He looked at her not moving, something settled and certain and entirely unguarded in his expression — the same look she’d first glimpsed years ago in a hospital corridor, crouched beside a frightened boy and a stuffed elephant, before he’d learned to hide it again so quickly she’d nearly missed it.
He didn’t hide it now. “Thank you,” he said quietly, “for being worth becoming brave for.” Outside, the snow kept falling, soft and endless over the mountain, over the small village, over the whole quiet, improbable shape of a life neither of them had planned quite this carefully and had somehow, together, built anyway — one elephant, one apartment, one promise, one mountain at a time.
They flew home five days later with sore muscles, four hundred photographs, and — though neither of them would know it for several more weeks — one small, impossible souvenir that had never appeared on any packing list.