Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Axel
Sun on fresh snow always looks too bright, too pure, a white sheet thrown over a mess and called beautiful. The peaks cut hard against an impossible blue sky, and Devil’s Peak wears last night’s storm like new armor. Cold slides under my collar; the air tastes like metal and pine.
I’m signing off a maintenance log when I feel her.
Savannah steps out of the side entrance with a coffee the size of my fist and cheeks flushed from the walk from her rental. She stops on the top step, scanning the valley like she’s measuring it, then pushes her hair back with a gloved knuckle and looks straight at me.
There’s a split second where everything goes silent—no engines, no banter, no clatter of tools. The world tightens to her breath in the cold and the way sunlight threads her hair gold.
Then the past moves.
Not walking. Not running.
Arriving. All at once.
I see a girl with paint on her fingers because we were making signs for the winter carnival—hers neat, mine a disaster—and she told me it didn’t matter if the letters were crooked because crooked looks charming.
I see a boy with blood on his knee because he tried to jump the river from the wrong rock and she pressed gauze to the scrape with the focus of a surgeon, telling me to hold still while she blew my hair out of my eyes.
I hear her laugh from a sled, hear her mother singing badly to carols while cinnamon burned in the oven, hear my mother and hers at the table debating whether tinsel was tacky or classic until we fell asleep under a quilt that smelled like cedar.
My throat locks.
I set the clipboard on the bumper before I drop it.
She comes down the steps slowly, like she’s remembering how to walk in a place where the ground used to move under us.
Frost squeaks under her boots. The sun glances off her cheekbones.
When she reaches the bottom step, she pauses, a breath catching, eyes flaring the way they do when she’s about to push through something sharp.
We stop two yards apart.
Close enough to feel her body heat. Far enough to pretend this is casual.
“Morning,” she says, voice soft but steady.
“Hey.” My voice comes out rough. I clear it, fail to smooth anything out. “You on early?”
“Rolled in for inventory. Dax’s still learning where we hide the good saline.”
“Top shelf behind the blankets,” I say, automatic.
Her mouth curves. “You always did hoard the good stuff.”
“You always found it.” I force a smile. “Human bloodhound.”
“Insult or compliment?”
“Both.”
She lifts her cup toward me. “Truce coffee?”
“Only if it’s gasoline.”
“Close.” She looks at the peaks like a shield. “It’s obscenely pretty today.”
“Snow globe,” I say before thinking.
Her head tips. “You said that when we were young.”
I blink. “I did?”
She nods. “First big snow after my mom died. We stood on your porch and you said it looked like the mountain went inside a snow globe. I told you to shake it harder so the flakes would stick to the pines.”
I remember it now—her hair jammed under a beanie with a pom-pom.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “That day.”
She studies my face like she can read what I didn’t say. “We were annoying.”
“We were loud.”
“We were… okay.”
Some days we were. Some days we weren’t.
Snow slips off the bay roof in a soft rush. The sound shakes the spell. The guys yell about chains and torque in the background, the world remembers it has business, and I remember we should too.
“Got training in ten,” I say, jerking my chin toward the side yard. “Hose evolutions. You’ll hate it.”
“I’ll hate watching you refuse to wear your hat,” she counters. “Your ears are practically frostbite.”
“Romantic.”
“Practical.” Her eyes flick to my hair—bare head, cold wind—and then back to mine like the sight offended her.
“You used to steal my beanies,” I say.
“You used to leave them on my staircase like you were feeding a stray.”
“You were a stray.”
“I was a menace,” she corrects, and the corner of my mouth lifts before I can stop it.
The warmth that hits me isn’t just memory. It’s now. It’s her. It’s the way she stands in the light like she belongs to it.
A shout snaps my attention sideways—Torres arguing about whether a gasket is seated right. I call that I’ll check it and start to turn, but Savannah’s voice freezes me in place.
“Do you ever think about who we would’ve been?” she asks, quiet, not looking at me, looking at the peaks like they might answer.
I look at her profile, the strong line of her nose, the stubborn chin I used to touch with my thumb when I wanted her to meet my eyes.
“Every day,” I say.
She swallows. I watch the movement. It feels like touching and hurts the same.
“I keep remembering those stupid holiday pageants,” she says, lips quirking. “You hating the angel wings. Me demanding extra glitter. Your mom bribing you with hot chocolate if you didn’t rip the halo off in disgust.”
“It itched.”
“It sparkled.”
“It shed on my neck. I was a disco ball.”
“You were handsome,” she says—and then looks like she wants to bite the word in half.
Something kicks inside my chest. Slow, mean, grateful.
“You were bossy,” I manage.
“Still am.”
“Yeah,” I say, softer than I should. “Still are.”
Wind rifles the flag out front. A car passes on the road, tires whispering over packed snow. Somewhere a dog barks twice, impatient and alive. Everything feels too bright and too clear, the way winter light cuts all the shadows short.
“When my mom was sick,” she says, voice going careful, “your mom put a pie on our porch every Sunday and pretended she was experimenting with crusts, like it wasn’t pity.”
“She loved your mom,” I say. “Still does.”
“Your family kept us tethered.” Her mouth lifts. “Your sister taught me to braid. Your dad taught me to split wood. You stole my mittens to ‘keep them safe’ and then wore them until the thumbs blew out.”
“They were superior mittens.”
“They were pink with hearts.”
“War mittens,” I say with a grin.
She laughs. The sound hits me square in the sternum and slides under my ribs like heat. I want to catch it in my hands and stick it somewhere permanent.
“You shielded me from the eighth-grade terrors,” she says, and the light dims a degree. “You stood between me and whatever hurt worse.”
“You did the same,” I say, and she looks at me like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “After my dad lost that contract and everyone had an opinion about Ramirezes being unlucky, you told the boys on the bus you’d break their teeth if they said my name like a curse again.”
She blinks. “I… did?”
“Threatened dental work. Very convincing.”
She hides a smile in her cup. Then, quieter: “I remember bandaging your hand after you punched the locker because Brandon called your mom a—” She cuts herself off, eyes flashing. “You were so mad. I could feel it shaking in your bones.”
“And you told me to hold still,” I say, hearing the echo of her sixteen-year-old voice in the shape of my name. “And I did.”
We look at each other for a long time. A cable draws taut between us, a line we step onto every time we get this close. Memory isn’t a soft blanket here; it’s a fault line. One shift and everything breaks open.
She looks away first, toward the river cutting a dark ribbon through the snow in the distance. “Sometimes I try to picture a version where the fire doesn’t happen.”
“Don’t,” I say immediately. “It’s a trap.”
Her eyes come back, curious. “How?”
“You build a house in your head. Different rooms, different paint. You walk it at night and memorize where the light falls. Then you wake up and you’re still standing in the ash.”
She studies me like she wants to open my chest to read the truth carved on the inside.
“What’s in your house?” she asks softly.
“You,” I say before I can stop it.
Wind lifts my words and flings them across the yard. I can’t take them back. I don’t try.
Color touches her cheeks that isn’t from the cold. She holds my stare like she’s scared of what happens if she lets it go.
“Axel,” she says, quiet warning.
“I know,” I say, the two words packed with ten years. I exhale into the cold until I see the shape of it. “We were kids. We didn’t know what we were doing. We don’t have to pretend a different timeline fixes anything.”
“Doesn’t stop me from wondering,” she murmurs.
“Me either.” I glance down at the snow between our boots, then back at her. “But the version where the fire doesn’t happen doesn’t change what we are right now.”
“And what are we?” she asks, steadier than I am.
“Two people who remember too much,” I say. “Two people who keep running into each other. Two people who can’t stop feeling like the ground’s about to move.”
She swallows, looks at my mouth, looks away. “I hate that you’re right.”
“You always did.”
She flicks a glance at the yard where Torres is still swearing at the gasket. “You should go save their pride.”
“They lost it in ’19.”
“Then save the truck.”
“That I can do.” I take a step back because I have to, because standing this close to her on a morning like this is how men make mistakes they spend months paying for. “You want to watch training or pretend paperwork is urgent?”
She tips her head. “If I watch training, I’ll critique your hat situation.”
“I won’t wear it out of spite.”
She fights a smile. “Paperwork it is.”
I start to turn, then stop. “Savannah.”
She waits.
“I’m glad you remember the good parts,” I say.
“I try to,” she says. “Some days they’re loud enough.”
“Stay loud,” I say, and she nods like she’ll put that on a list and keep it.
I walk away, but every step pulls at something strung between us.
Torres hands me the offending coupling like it personally betrayed him.
I reseat the gasket, lock the cam, and toss it back.
He mutters thanks, eyes flicking over my shoulder toward the stairs where Savannah lingers another heartbeat before she goes inside.
“Man,” he says, not unkind. “You are cooked.”
“Shut up and get the cones,” I say.
Training takes up our next hour as we hook and unhook, flake and charge, run evolutions until my shoulders complain. We coil hose. Stow. Wipe. Cole dismisses us and barks at Torres about something he broke in ’19. The guys scatter. I walk toward the door like I’m not counting the steps.
She meets me halfway, which is the cruelest, kindest thing.
“Your form’s better,” she says, dry.
“Yours always was.” I gesture at the clipboard. “Productive paperwork?”
“Absolutely none.”
“Thought so.”
She looks past me to the yard. “When I was nine, your mom braided garland with me and pretended it was important so I wouldn’t hear the adults whispering.”
“Yeah.”
“When I was sixteen,” she says, voice thinning a little, “you stole the keys and took me to the overlook so I could cry where no one had to see.”
I remember the weight of those keys in my palm. I remember the way she pressed her forehead to the cold window and said nothing for twenty minutes and then said everything in five. “We don’t talk about my record,” I say.
She huffs. “Statute of limitations.”
I lean one shoulder to the jamb opposite her, the space between us a magnetic field. “When we were eight, you smacked Brandon with a snow shovel because he called me poor.”
“He deserved worse.”
“I deserved the shovel.”
“You deserved pie.”
I swallow. Something opens behind my breastbone and I don’t have a name for it that doesn’t sound like begging.
“We were good,” she says, almost to herself.
“We were,” I say, and it lands like a promise.
Her eyes lift to mine, and for a heartbeat the sun, the snow, the entire town—everything—drops away. There’s just this. The fault line. The heat rising. The rock about to shift.
Footsteps scrape behind us. A civilian at the front desk asks for a burn permit. Reality shoves back between us like a body.
She clears her throat. “I have a restock request to file.”
“I have a pump panel to baby,” I say.
We don’t move.
I look at her mouth. She looks at my hands. The air lifts the hairs on my wrist. Light finds her throat. A memory steps between us and lays down a blueprint—how to close the distance, how to set my palm at her jaw, how to ask without words.
I drag my gaze up and make a different decision.
“Come by the overlook after shift,” I hear myself say. “Just to… see it. The snow globe.”
Her inhale catches. “Axel…”
“Or don’t,” I add, a line out, a shield up. “You don’t owe me a damn thing.”
Her eyes shine the way snow does right before it blinds you. “Text me the time.”
Lightning under my skin. “Seventeen hundred.”
“Bossy,” she says, but there’s no bite in it. “I’ll think about it.”
She pushes off the jamb and goes, and I stay where I am until my heart stops trying to climb out of my throat.
Torres drifts by, catches my expression, keeps going with a low whistle that sounds like God help you both.
He’s late.
God’s been busy with us for years.
I pick up the clipboard I abandoned, write notes I won’t remember, and look out past the bay at the mountains watching us like witnesses. The sun glances off new snow and pretends everything’s clean.
It’s not.
But for the first time in a decade, I want to live inside the snow globe anyway. Even if the ground shifts under my feet. Even if we crack the glass.
Especially then.