Chapter 6
FINN
The fire takes longer to build than it should.
My hands know the work—kindling first, arranged in a careful pyramid, then smaller logs stacked to allow airflow, then the larger pieces that will burn slow and hot through the night.
I’ve done this a thousand times. Could do it blindfolded if I had to.
But tonight my movements are clumsy, distracted by the woman sitting on my couch with her phone pressed to her ear.
Marcella’s voice is soft, meant for her friend and not for me, but the ranger station isn’t large. I can’t help but hear.
“I’m fine, Cora. I promise. Yes, really fine. The cabin—the actual cabin, not the rental—is really nice, and Finn is...” She pauses. I keep my back to her, feeding another log into the flames, pretending I’m not hanging on her next words. “He’s actually really kind. Just quiet.”
Something in my chest tightens.
Kind. When’s the last time anyone described me that way?
Moira calls me stubborn. The few people in town who know me probably use words like strange or reclusive or that weird hermit up the mountain.
My therapist at the VA—the one I stopped seeing after three sessions—called me avoidant and resistant to treatment.
But this woman, this stranger who’s known me for all of three hours, looks at me and sees kind.
I don’t know what to do with that.
“No, I can’t send a picture. There’s barely any signal, and—Coralyn, I’m not going to secretly photograph the man while I’m a guest in his home. That’s creepy.” She laughs, and the sound warms the room more than the fire. “Yes, I’ll be careful. Yes, I’ll text you in the morning. Love you too. Bye.”
I hear her phone click off. Feel her attention shift to me.
“Sorry about that,” she says. “Coralyn worries.”
“She should.” I stand, brushing bark from my hands. “You’re snowed in with a stranger in the middle of nowhere.”
“A stranger who makes incredible furniture and didn’t murder me when I broke into his house.” There’s a smile in her voice. “I think I got lucky with my accidental home invasion.”
I turn to face her. She’s curled up on my couch—the one I spent two months building, getting the angles right, making sure the cushions were deep enough to sink into—and she looks like she belongs there. Like I made it for her without knowing it.
The thought is dangerous. I push it away.
“Fire should hold for a few hours,” I say. “I’ll add more logs before bed.”
“Before your bed, you mean. Since you’re apparently sleeping on the floor like some kind of medieval knight guarding the castle.”
“The couch—”
“Is too short for you. I saw you measuring it with your eyes earlier.” She pats the cushion beside her. “Sit. Keep me company. Unless you have important hermit business to attend to.”
I should say no. I should retreat to my workshop corner, find something to sand or carve, maintain the distance that keeps me functional.
But her eyes are warm in the firelight, and she’s looking at me like my presence is wanted rather than tolerated, and before I can stop myself, I’m crossing the room and lowering myself onto the opposite end of the couch.
Not too close. But closer than I’ve been to another person in months.
“There,” Marcella says, satisfaction in her voice. “Was that so hard?”
“Yes.”
She laughs again, and I feel it somewhere behind my ribs. “At least you’re honest.”
We sit in silence for a moment, watching the fire. The wind has settled into a steady howl, background noise now rather than the screaming assault it was earlier. Snow ticks against the windows in a rhythm that’s almost soothing.
“Can I ask you something?” Marcella’s voice is softer now. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
I tense, waiting for the question I’ve been dreading. What happened to you? Why do you live alone? What’s wrong with you?
“The furniture,” she says instead. “When did you start making it?”
The breath I didn’t know I was holding escapes slowly. “Four years ago. After I got out.”
“Got out of what?”
“Marines.”
She’s quiet, processing. I can see her fitting pieces together—my posture, my clipped speech, the military precision of my routines. “How long were you in?”
“Eight years. Three deployments.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Felt longer.”
She doesn’t push for details. Doesn’t ask about combat or injuries or any of the things civilians usually want to know. Instead, she asks, “What made you start building?”
The question catches me off guard. Most people want the war stories. The drama. They don’t care about the quiet moments after, the slow work of putting yourself back together.
“Needed something to do with my hands,” I say finally. “Something that wasn’t—” I stop, unsure how to finish.
“Destructive?”
I look at her sharply. She meets my gaze, those brown eyes soft with understanding rather than pity.
“Yeah,” I admit. “Something to create instead of... the alternative.”
“That makes sense.” She pulls her legs up onto the couch, tucking them beneath her. “I started my food blog for a similar reason, I think. I needed something that was mine. Something I could build that nobody could take away from me.”
“Your ex?”
It’s not exactly a wild guess but from the way she flinches when she mentions him, the casual cruelty she references like it’s normal, I’m pretty sure I guessed right.
“Stephen. Yeah. He didn’t—” She pauses, starts again.
“He didn’t hit me or anything. I want to be clear about that.
But he had a way of making me feel like everything I did was wrong.
Too loud, too much, too passionate about stupid things.
Every time I got excited about a recipe or a new idea for the blog, he’d sigh.
This little sound, like I was exhausting him just by existing. ”
My hands curl into fists against my thighs. “Cooking isn’t stupid.”
“He thought it was. Called it my ‘cute little hobby.’ Said I was wasting time that could be spent on something productive.” She laughs, but there’s no humor in it.
“Three years of hearing that, and you start to believe it. Start to make yourself smaller so you don’t take up so much space.
So you don’t annoy anyone with your existence. ”
The fire crackles. I stare into it, trying to unclench my jaw.
“My team used to fight over who got to eat my MRE sides,” I say quietly. “Rice, beans, whatever. I could make that crap taste decent with the right combinations. They said it was a gift.”
Marcella is very still beside me. Waiting.
“Jimmy—my team leader—he used to say I should open a restaurant when I got out. Called me ‘Chef McGrath’ as a joke. Said I was wasted as a sniper when I could be making real money feeding people.” The memory surfaces, bittersweet.
Jimmy with his easy grin, his terrible jokes, his way of making everyone feel like family. “He never got out.”
“Finn...”
“IED. Four years ago. Whole team except me.” The words come out flat, factual. It’s the only way I can say them. “Six men. Six brothers. And I was fifty meters away, checking a building, when the world exploded. Should have been with them.”
The silence stretches. I wait for the platitudes—it wasn’t your fault, they’d want you to be happy, everything happens for a reason. The empty words I’ve heard a hundred times from people who mean well but don’t understand that some wounds don’t heal, they just scar over.
“That’s an unbearable thing to carry,” Marcella says softly.
I look at her. She’s not crying, but her eyes are bright, and there’s something in her expression I don’t recognize at first. Then I do.
She sees me. Not the broken veteran, not the tragic story, not the cautionary tale. Just me, carrying something heavy, doing my best to keep moving forward.
“Yeah,” I manage. “It is.”
We sit with that for a moment. The fire burns. The wind howls. And somehow, the silence between us feels less like distance and more like understanding.
“The furniture,” Marcella says eventually, her voice gentle. “That’s how you honor them, isn’t it? By creating things that will last.”
My throat tightens. Nobody’s ever said it like that. Not even Moira, who knows me better than anyone.
“I don’t know if it’s honoring them,” I admit. “Sometimes it feels more like penance.”
“Maybe it can be both.”
I turn to look at her—really look—and find her watching me with an expression that makes my chest ache.
Firelight plays across her face, highlighting the curve of her cheek, the fullness of her lips.
She’s beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with conventional standards and everything to do with the warmth that radiates from her like heat from the hearth.
“You’re easy to talk to,” I say. The words surprise me.
Her smile is soft. Sad. “My ex would disagree.”
“Your ex was an idiot.”
She laughs, startled and genuine. “Yeah. He really was.”
The tension in the room shifts. Still charged, but warmer now. More intimate. I’m acutely aware of the space between us on the couch—not much, maybe two feet—and how easy it would be to close it.
Marcella reaches out toward the arm of the couch, tracing the carved details with her fingertips. “This is beautiful work,” she murmurs. “You can feel the care in every line.”
Her hand moves along the wood, and mine is resting there—I forgot I’d put it there—and suddenly her fingers brush against mine.
We both freeze.
The contact is small. Barely anything. Her fingertips against my knuckles, the barest whisper of touch. But it sends electricity arcing up my arm, and from the sharp intake of her breath, she feels it too.
Our eyes meet across the fire-lit space between us.
I should pull away. I should break the contact, make some excuse, retreat to safety. Every instinct honed by four years of isolation is screaming at me to run.
But I don’t move.
And neither does she.
The fire crackles. The storm rages. And in the warm glow of candlelight, something shifts between us that can’t be unshifted.
Wrong timing, I think. Wrong circumstances. Wrong everything.
But her hand is still touching mine, and she’s looking at me like I’m something worth seeing, and for the first time in four years, I don’t want to be alone.