19. Stella
STELLA
The rental car smells like synthetic pine and stale coffee, and it handles like a shopping trolley on the motorway, and every mile I put between myself and Harlow County feels like I'm pulling stitches out of something that hasn't had nearly enough time to heal.
I have the heat cranked all the way up. It blows hot and dusty through the vents and still doesn't touch the cold that's settled somewhere within me, which I know isn't a physiological cold because I've been warm and fed and I slept eight hours in a proper motel bed with a duvet that smelled only of commercial laundry detergent and absolutely nothing else.
Nothing like pine resin and wood smoke and the specific warm dark scent of Kirk Jotham that I'm apparently going to be cataloguing in my memory for the foreseeable future like some kind of deranged archivist.
I drive for six hours through the basin that opens up below the mountains, and I observe the landscape change from white ridgelines and dark timber to brown fields and then to the spreading grey sprawl of the city growing on the horizon, and I think about how I made exactly the same drive five days ago and I was a completely different person.
That Stella was annoyed about traffic and worried about Jack's retreat and listening to a podcast about productivity.
She had absolutely no idea what was waiting for her at the top of that mountain in the dark.
She was also, I realise, profoundly unhappy, and had been for quite some time, and had gotten so good at performing her own enthusiasm that she'd stopped noticing.
I merge onto the motorway and the traffic closes around me like a fist.
My apartment is on the fourteenth floor of a glass building in the kind of neighbourhood where the coffee costs six dollars and everyone walks fast and makes eye contact with nobody.
I wait in the open-plan living area with my ruined duffel bag at my feet and I look at it.
All of it. The grey sectional sofa I picked because it photographed well.
The abstract print above the fireplace I bought because the interior designer said it was the right scale for the wall.
The kitchen island in white quartz that I have eaten exactly four meals at in two years because I'm usually eating at my desk or not eating at all.
The whole place is the temperature of a climate-controlled waiting room. The heating system is sophisticated and silent and completely adequate and I miss the woodstove so acutely I press the back of my hand to my mouth.
I showered. I found real clothes. I called my neighbour Mrs Petrova who had been feeding my plants and she told me the monster was looking a bit peaky and I said I'd be in to check on it soon.
I made coffee in my proper machine with the proper beans and drank half of it and left the rest going cold and ordered myself to stop.
Stop thinking about him. Stop thinking about the cabin.
Stop thinking about the way his chest felt under my cheek in the dark, or the way he'd looked at me over the cast-iron pan like I was something he hadn't expected and couldn't quite account for, or the way his hands, those massive, scarred, careful hands, had touched me like I was something worth being careful with.
My phone rings. I already know who it is before I look at the screen. Jack has rung four times since I left the motel. I've sent three of them to voicemail. This time I answer because I'm apparently a glutton and also because at some point it will be worse to keep avoiding it.
"Finally." His voice is tight and clipped and I can hear him pacing.
Jack always paces when he's furious. "Do you have any idea the amount of damage this has caused?
The Whitmore Group is threatening to pull their business entirely.
I had to personally call Sandra Whitmore on a Sunday to apologise, Stella. A Sunday."
"I crashed my car," I say. "In a blizzard."
"Which would have been avoided entirely if you'd left when I told you to, instead of —"
"You told me to keep driving into the storm."
"I told you to be professional and fulfill your obligations to this company.
" He stops pacing. I can hear it, the quality of the silence.
He does this when he wants his next sentence to land.
"You are going to come in this morning. You are going to apologise to Sandra Whitmore in person, draft a revised proposal for an alternative retreat date, and we will move forward. This is not a request."
I sit down on the grey sofa. The cushions are firm and unyielding.
I look at the abstract print on the wall.
I think about Kirk's walls. The actual walls , hewn timber chinked with mortar, hung with his father's old surveying maps and a rifle rack and one single, faded watercolour of a mountain lake that looked like something a child had made, beloved and unpretentious and completely perfect.
"Stella." Jack's voice has gone to its lowest register, which is the one that means he is about to say something he considers final. "I need you here in two hours."
I stand up. I pick up my bag. I find my good coat on the rack by the door, the elegant charcoal wool one that I bought to look competent in boardrooms. I put it on.
I look at myself in the entry mirror and I look exactly like the person Jack needs me to be, and I feel nothing looking at her except a faint, tired pity.
"I'll be in," I say. "Give me an hour."
Jack's firm occupies the top three floors of a glass tower on Fifth.
Everything about it communicates success through the medium of reflective surfaces.
The lift doors open to the reception desk and Marvena at the front gives me a look of such profound sympathetic relief when she sees me that I nearly turn around and get back in the lift.
"He's been in since six," she mouths.
I straighten my coat and walk to his office.
Jack is behind his desk when I open the door and he looks at me with the expression of someone who has been saving this moment.
He is impeccably dressed. His hair is arranged with its usual architecture.
He has a coffee from the good machine and a yellow legal pad covered in his cramped handwriting and he looks, as he always does, like a man who has never experienced a moment of unscripted wilderness in his entire life.
"Sit down," he says.
I stay standing.
His eyes flicker. "Stella."
"I heard you the first time." My voice comes out even. Steady. It surprises me. "I'm going to let you say what you need to say, Jack, because it's clearly been sitting in your mouth for a week and swallowing it isn't doing you any favors."
He sets down the coffee. He links his fingers on the desk. This is the posture he uses when he's about to disembowel a quarterly budget presentation. "Your conduct during this incident has been —"
"I was in a car accident," I say. "I was unconscious in a ditch in a blizzard for an indeterminate amount of time.
I had a mild concussion, moderately severe hypothermia, and no means of communication for eight days.
I survived because a stranger dragged me out of a crumpled car in the night and kept me alive at significant personal expense.
Not because of anything this company did or offered or cared about. "
Jack blinks once. "The Whitmore account —"
"Is not more important than what I just described to you.
" I reach for the small framed photo on the corner of his desk.
It's one of those meaningless stock-art pictures that interior decorators put in offices to make them seem inhabited.
Two generic businesspeople shaking hands.
I set it back down. "Do you know what I thought about, lying in that ditch? "
"Stella, this is not the —"
"I thought about whether anyone would notice before the road cleared." I look at him directly. "And I realised that the answer, as far as this office was concerned, was that you would notice the Whitmore retreat wasn't set up. That's what you would notice. Not me."
The silence is different now. Jack has uncoupled his fingers. He is watching me with the particular wariness of a man who has just recognised that the conversation has changed shape and he doesn't yet know where the new edges are.
"Now." I lift my bag from the chair where I'd put it.
"You can tell Sandra Whitmore that I'm sorry the retreat was disrupted, and I genuinely am, because I suspect Sandra Whitmore is a perfectly reasonable person.
But I'm not going to draft a new proposal for her.
And I'm not going to apologise to you, or come in on Sundays, or drive into any more blizzards because you've decided that a quarterly wellness retreat is worth more than road safety and basic human mortality.
" I button the top button of my coat. "I quit, Jack.
Effective immediately. Marvena can deal with my access card. "
Jack stands up. His chair rolls back against the credenza with a hard crack. "If you walk out of this office right now, I will ensure that every events firm in this city knows —"
"That I survived a car crash and didn't come back and grovel?" I'm already at the door. "Then they'll know I have a spine. That might actually be useful."
I open the door and I walk out and I do not look back.
Marvena catches my arm at the reception desk and squeezes it and doesn't say anything at all, and that is the kindest thing anyone in this building has done for me in two years.
I get into the lift and the doors close and I stand there in the mirrored box going down fourteen floors and I fully expect the bottom to drop out of my chest and the panic to set in, because I have just quit my job without another one lined up and I have a lease and utilities and a monster that is apparently already struggling.
Instead, something that has been clenched tight behind my ribs for longer than I can accurately identify releases. Slowly, like a knot worked loose by patient fingers. My breath comes deeper. My shoulders drop.
I walk out of the tower into the midday street noise and the cold grey city air and I feel, for the first time since Kirk's truck pulled away from the Harlow Inn car park, something adjacent to myself again.
It lasts for exactly the length of the walk home. Four blocks. Up the lift. Key in the door.
I push it open and I stop.
He fills the hallway.
There is no other way to describe it. Kirk Jotham is standing in the corridor outside my apartment with his broad shoulders nearly touching both walls and his heavy plaid jacket carrying the cold from outside and his dark beard and his grave, quiet face and those icy eyes that are watching me with the same contained intensity he brought to everything, the axe, the fire, the radio, me, and I am so completely shocked that I stand in my open doorway for a full four seconds producing no sound whatsoever.
Which, for me, is genuinely unprecedented.
He's holding something. It takes me a moment to process what it is because I am still trying to understand what he is, physically, in this context, this bear of a man crammed into my narrow modern hallway under the recessed lighting that was definitely designed for smaller people.
His hat is in his left hand, turned by the brim, one slow rotation, the way he'd rotated a coffee mug on the table when he was thinking.
In his right hand, folded into a precise square, is my yellow scarf.
"You left this," Kirk says.
His voice is exactly the same as I remember it. Low and rough, the words used sparingly like he's conserving something. Like every word costs him and he has decided this particular expenditure is worth it.
I look at the scarf. I look at him. My throat has done something complicated and uncooperative. "You drove six hours to return a scarf."
He looks at me. He doesn't say anything.
"Kirk." My voice comes out smaller than I intend it to.
All the courage I used up in Jack's office is apparently spent because I am standing in my own doorway shaking slightly and I cannot tell if it's shock or cold or the specific overwhelming fact of him being here, in my building, on my floor, looking at me like that.
"Couldn't leave it," he says finally. The words land flat and honest and with the characteristic Kirk Jotham total absence of elaboration.
"The scarf?" I say. "Or —"
"No." He meets my eyes. "Not the scarf."
The hallway is very quiet. Somewhere on the floor below us, a television murmurs.
The lift hums in its shaft. Kirk stands in my hall with the city entirely wrong around him, too glass and too grey and too small for his particular scale, and he holds my ridiculous yellow scarf and he watches me with those dark, steady eyes, and he waits.
He is very good at waiting. I have firsthand knowledge of this.
My eyes are doing something embarrassing and I blink hard and stand up straighter.
"You should come in," I say. "If you want.
I mean, you don't have to, but you clearly didn't drive six hours to hand me a scarf in a hallway and I've just quit my job, so I have nowhere to be, and I've got a monster that needs checking on, and?—"
"Stella." He says my name the way he says everything else. Like it matters.
I stop talking.
"I'm going to come in," Kirk says. His voice is very quiet and very certain. "If that's all right."
I step back from the door. I hold it open. He moves through it and he is warm and solid and he smells like pine resin and cold air and when he passes me his arm brushes mine and the knot pulls another full inch loose.
He stops in my living room and looks at it.
The grey sofa and the white quartz and the art on the wall and all of it.
He takes it in the way he takes everything in, with that slow, comprehensive attention.
Then he looks back at me and his expression doesn't change but something in his eyes does, something that might, on another man, be the precursor to a question.
I answer it anyway, because I process verbally and also because I suspect if one of us is going to say the hard thing it will have to be me and I have just set my entire career on fire so I am apparently in the mood.
"I hated it," I tell him. "Before the storm.
I was already miserable and I hadn't let myself know it.
" I place my palms flat on the kitchen counter and look at him across the island.
"And then I spent eight days stuck on a mountain with the most aggravating, taciturn, infuriating man I have ever met in my life, and it was the most alive I've felt in years. "
Kirk sets my yellow scarf down on the kitchen counter between us. He puts it down with the same deliberate care he gives to everything. Then he puts both hands flat on his side, and he looks at me, and the quality of his attention is so complete and so focused that it is almost a physical pressure.
"Tell me what you want," he says.