Chapter 4
ALEX
The satellite phone gives me the weather service at six in the morning, and the weather service gives me news I don't want. There’s a second front.
Stacked behind the first storm like a fist behind a fist. The system that was supposed to break in forty-eight hours is now the opening act for something bigger, and the revised forecast puts road access at least five more days minimum. Possibly longer.
The woman on the weather service sounds apologetic about it, as if the atmosphere is her personal responsibility.
I thank her. End the call. Set the phone on the desk in my office and look at the wall.
Five days. Kendall has been here for two, and in those two days I've learned too much. Her hands, her throat, the way she walks the long way around the island to avoid touching me, and the exact sound she makes when she almost laughs.
Yesterday she said something on the porch that made me almost smile, and the almost-smile hasn't stopped bothering me. It sat in my jaw all night like a cramp.
Five more days of this and the margin I'm working with will be gone. There won't be a margin. There'll just be her, in my lodge, moving through my rooms, smelling like soap that has no business doing what it does to me.
The question is what I tell her.
The honest answer is five days minimum. The honest answer is also the answer that would change everything about how she's moving through this lodge.
Right now she's operating on 'a few days,' which lets her treat the stay as temporary.
Temporary lets her breathe. Breathing lets her almost laugh at my brother and almost smile at me and almost relax the grip she keeps on that bag.
Five days minimum takes 'a few' and turns it into a sentence, and a woman who flinched at a dropped pan isn't going to hear five days minimum and keep breathing the way she's been breathing.
'A few more days.' That's what I'll tell her. True enough to not be a lie. Vague enough to not be a cage.
The logic is clean. The logic is also the logic of a man who is deciding what information a woman in his house gets to have about her own situation, and if I were someone else I'd call that what it is.
I close the office door and go make coffee.
Bryan is in the kitchen. He has his own mug, his own chair, his own silence that takes up more room than Dash's entire personality.
He's reading something on his phone, and he doesn't look up when I come in, which is how I know he's about to say something I don't want to hear.
The coffee takes its time brewing. I wait.
"How long?" Bryan asks without looking up.
"Five days. Maybe more."
Now he looks up. "And you're going to tell her?"
"A few more days."
Bryan sets his phone down. The gesture is deliberate, the way everything Bryan does is deliberate. He folds his hands on the table.
"Alex."
"Bryan."
"The woman is stranded. She has a right to know how long."
"She has a right to not panic."
"You're making that decision for her."
The words land with the precision Bryan brings to everything, and the precision is what makes them difficult to deflect. He isn't wrong. I know he isn't wrong.
But knowing something and acting on it are two different operations, and right now the one that keeps her breathing wins.
"She flinched at a pan," I say. "Cameron dropped a pan and she flinched like she was bracing for impact. Her hand went to her wrist. She covered it. The smile came back before Cameron finished picking up the pan."
Bryan's face doesn't change. But his hands, folded on the table, go still in a way that means he's processing.
"That doesn't give you the right to manage her information."
"It gives me context."
"Context isn't permission, Alex."
The silence that follows is the kind Bryan is best at, the kind that sits in a room and waits for you to argue with it and punishes you when you do. I don't argue with it. I pour two mugs of coffee and set one in front of him.
"Five days," I say. "I'll tell her when the timing is right."
"The timing is right now."
"Bryan."
He picks up the mug. Drinks. The conversation is over in the way Bryan's conversations are always over, which is to say he's made his point and will hold it in reserve until the moment it does the most damage.
I can feel it sitting behind his silence, patient and steady.
The kitchen door opens and Kendall comes in. Different shirt today, a worn henley with the sleeves pushed past her elbows, which means her bag held more than I assumed.
The bag is still on her shoulder, same practiced scan of the room before her feet stop moving.
Her hair is pushed back from her face, and the line of her jaw is sharper without it. I'm tracking it before my first cup is finished and I need to stop.
"Morning," she says. Her eyes move from me to Bryan and back.
"Coffee's fresh," I say.
"Storm update?" She asks it casually, but the question has weight.
'A few more days.' The words are ready. They sit on my tongue, shaped and rehearsed.
"A few more days," I say. "Second front moving in behind the first. Roads are going to stay closed for a while."
Her expression doesn't change. The composure holds.
But her hand drifts to the strap of her bag, fingers brushing the buckle once before the hand drops back to her side. Too fast to be casual.
"Okay," she says. One word. Flat and measured.
She pours coffee and takes it to the table, and Bryan watches her sit down with the attention of a man who has just watched his brother withhold information from a woman who deserved the full picture.
I meet Bryan's eyes across the kitchen. His expression says everything it needs to say.
He picks up his phone. Resumes reading. The judgment doesn't need words. It fills every corner of the room without them.
By midmorning the woodpile on the porch needs restocking. The covered stack behind the lodge is accessible but buried under drift, and the job requires two people: one to dig and one to haul.
Cameron is elbow-deep in the generator's fuel filter housing. Dash is somewhere being Dash.
"I can help," Kendall says.
She's standing in the mudroom doorway, already pulling on the borrowed coat.
She isn't asking. She's informing me, and the distinction registers somewhere it shouldn't.
"It's heavy work."
"I grew up in a house with a woodstove. I know what a log weighs."
The response is flat and factual, and it shuts down the objection so cleanly that arguing would require me to admit the objection wasn't about the weight.
The real objection was about the borrowed coat, the cold, the fact that she's thinner than she should be. None of those are reasons I'm going to say out loud.
"Gloves are on the shelf," I say. "The thick ones."
The work is straightforward. I dig. She hauls. The rhythm of it establishes itself within minutes, and the efficiency of her is disorienting.
She doesn't need instructions. She watches what I do, adjusts, and falls into the pattern.
When I hand her a split log, she takes it with both hands, shifts the weight to her hip, and walks to the porch stack without wasted motion. Her boots find the packed snow between the drifts on the first try.
The competence is unreasonably attractive. I've run this lodge for half my life, and in that time I've worked alongside dozens of people who needed to be told where to put things, how to stack, when to watch for ice.
Kendall watches once and adapts. Her body learns the terrain in real time, adjusting her center of gravity on the uneven ground, and the quick intelligence of her movement does things to my focus that I am handling badly.
We work in silence for a while. The cold is sharp, the wind lower than yesterday. The physical labor generates enough heat that she unzips the coat after the first trip.
The henley underneath clings closer than the oversized sweater did. The curves that the coat hid are visible now, and I'm splitting wood with more force than the job requires because my hands need to be doing something that isn't reaching for her waist.
By the third trip, the exertion has changed her. A flush has crept up her throat and across her cheeks, visible even in the cold. Her breath comes in short white clouds that dissolve against the gray sky.
A strand of hair has come loose from where she pushed it back and it's sticking to the sweat along her temple. She hooks it behind her ear without breaking stride, and the motion lifts the collar of the henley away from her neck.
The skin underneath is damp and flushed. I can see her pulse.
I miss the log I'm aiming for and drive the maul into the stump. The impact jars up my arms. She doesn't notice. Or she pretends not to, which is worse.
On the next trip, I catch her.
She's coming back from the porch stack, empty-handed, and her eyes are on me.
Not on the woodpile, not on the path, not on the snow.
On my arms. On the pull of my shoulders through the flannel when I swing.
The look is quick, and she kills it the moment she realizes I've turned, but a moment too late.
Her gaze was low and focused and it wasn't assessing my technique.
She doesn't know I saw. I don't tell her. The knowledge tucks itself into a space behind my ribs and stays there, warm and private, and I let it stay.
She catches me looking a few minutes later. I'm stacking split rounds on the porch, and I look up and she's standing in the snow with a log balanced on her hip and her head tilted.
The expression on her face is the only thing I can call amused disapproval.
"You're watching my hands," she says.
The statement is delivered without inflection. A fact. A challenge. Both.
"I'm making sure you don't drop a log on your foot."
"My hands," she says. "Not my feet. You've been watching my hands since we started."
The accuracy of it is flawless. She's right. I have been watching her hands. The way her fingers wrap around the bark, the grip strength in her wrists, the careful placement of each log on the stack.