Chapter 16 Unanswered Questions
Chapter sixteen
Unanswered Questions
By early spring, the snow had retreated to the highest ridges, leaving the forest floor spongy and green.
New leaves unfurled on branches, fragile and bright.
Birdsong returned in earnest. In the cottage, a similar softening had taken place.
Snow White was comfortable. She would have denied it if anyone had accused her of it out loud.
Comfort, to her mind, seemed almost like a sin.
But there was no denying that she knew the sounds of the house now as well as she had once known the echo in the castle halls.
She knew the creak of the third stair, the one Drew always skipped.
She knew the whistle of wind through the chink near the chimney and how to stuff it with old cloth when the wind howled too loudly.
She knew which boards squeaked near the bed, which ones were safe to tread on when she needed to slip out to get a glass of water at night.
She knew the rhythms of six men’s tempers and tendernesses.
And they, whether they knew it or not, had begun to orbit her the way planets orbit a sun. Small gestures gave it away.
Harry, as always, gave his devotion in jubilation. “Look at you,” he’d say when she came in from the stream, skirts hitched, hair damp and cheeks flushed from the cold. “Like some forest spirit. We don’t deserve you.”
“Stop,” she’d say, swatting at him, but she’d be smiling.
When she burned the first batch of bread he’d taught her to knead alone, he didn’t tease. He tore off a piece of the darker crust, chewed it thoughtfully, and said, “Could be worse. It’s still better than Gage’s cooking.”
Gage, passing behind them, rolled his eyes. “You’ve never tasted my cooking.”
“There’s a reason for that,” Harry replied, winking.
In bed, Harry had become less of a frantic grab for release and more of a steady source of warmth. He lingered after, one hand playing absently with her hair, murmuring ridiculous things against her temple.
“If any of us had half a brain,” he said once, “we’d be courting you properly. Flowers every week, fancy dinners, the whole lot.”
“You can’t even manage not to track mud into the house,” she pointed out.
“True,” he conceded. “But in another life…”
She didn’t let him finish that sentence. Another life was a dangerous thought.
Drew developed a habit of taking her hand.
It happened first by accident. They were walking back from the stream, she with a basket of damp shirts balanced on her hip, he with an armful of firewood.
The path narrowed, muddy on one side, steep on the other.
She slipped. “Snow!” he cried. His hand shot out, fingers catching hers, steadying her.
They both froze. “Thank you,” she said, breathing a little harder than the stumble warranted.
He nodded, cheeks pink, but didn’t let go right away.
His fingers were calloused but gentle around hers.
After that, it happened more often. Sitting on the bench after dinner, shoulders touching, his hand would creep over to find hers.
At first she thought it was only nerves, something for him to fidget with instead of his own sleeves.
Then she realized he liked the contact for its own sake.
It wasn’t sexual, not really. There was no immediate lunge for her body afterward.
It was just… closeness. A quiet reassurance that he was there, that she was real, that between the chaos of shifts and shared nights, they existed in the small, calm moments too.
Bennett seemed to worship her. He was always nearby.
If she went to fetch water, there was a good chance he’d be in the yard chopping wood.
If she mended shirts by the fire, he’d be at the table whittling something, stealing glances at her over the shavings.
She caught him more than once halfway across the cottage with his mug, clearly having stood up to refill it and then forgotten his purpose because she’d smiled at something Silas had said.
He never quite found a reason to ask her for more of herself outside the bed. But in small ways, he gave her the kind of attention she had never gotten from anyone but her father. “Are you cold?” he asked one evening, noticing the way she’d rubbed her arms.
“Just a little,” she admitted.
The next day, he came back from town with a bundle of wool in his arms. “I thought,” he said, almost dropping it in his haste to get the words out, “maybe you could make yourself a shawl. Or I could—no, you probably don’t want me knitting—I just thought…”
She laughed softly and took it from him, pressing a kiss to his blushing cheek.
Even Dax softened at the edges. He began to ask her questions at odd times. Not probing ones about her past, but small, practical ones about her. “What do you like to read?” he asked once, catching her with a book in her lap when he came in early from the mine.
She blinked at him, finger marking her place. “Stories,” she said. “All kinds, fantasy, romance, stories about characters who are one way at the beginning of the book and entirely different at the end.”
“That sounds… complicated,” he said.
“It is,” she replied. “That’s what makes it interesting.”
Another day, as she sliced carrots, he nodded toward the pot. “Less salt,” he advised. “You always reach for it twice. Once is enough.”
She stared at him. “You noticed that?”
He shrugged. “I notice a lot of things. It’s my job.”
“Not here,” she said. “Here you could pretend not to notice if you wanted to.”
“You’re part of ‘here’ now,” he pointed out. “I don’t get to stop noticing you.” The words landed heavier in her chest than he’d probably intended.
Silas made no grand declarations of affection.
He just drifted over to her wherever she happened to be and leaned.
If she sat on the bench, he flopped down beside her, his head finding her lap as naturally as if it had been made for that spot.
If she stood at the stove, he wandered by and looped an arm around her waist, resting his chin on her shoulder until she hip-checked him away.
If she sat on the floor to mend a tear, he lay down behind her, pillowing his head on her back and sighing like someone who’d carried too much weight for too long.
He didn’t ask for much with words. But his body spoke clearly: you are safe.
Even Gage, grudgingly, began to show that he cared in his own twisted way. He snapped at her when she made mistakes. “What are you doing with that knife?” he barked once when he caught her trying to pry a stuck lid off a jar with the blade pointed toward her palm. “Trying to lose a thumb?”
“I’m just—”
“Doing it wrong,” he cut in. He snatched the knife, turned it, and popped the lid from the other side with a deft twist. “There. Try not to stab yourself before supper.”
“Thank you,” she said dryly.
He grunted. “Don’t thank me. I’m the one who’d have to bandage you.”
When he walked in on her and Drew playing some silly hand game Harry had taught them, laughing breathlessly as they tried to see who could tap the other’s fingers faster, he stopped in the doorway, jaw tightening. “Don’t you two have work to do?” he snapped. “The wood’s not going to chop itself.”
Drew opened his mouth, clearly about to retort. Snow White squeezed his hand subtly. “We were just going,” she said, smoothing the moment. “Come on, Drew.”
Later, when she found Gage alone in the shed sharpening tools, she leaned against the doorframe. “You know,” she said, “if you’re jealous, you could just say so.”
His head whipped around. “I’m not jealous,” he said at once. “Of what? That fool dropping the basin every time you smile at him?”
Her lips twitched. “So you’ve noticed I smile.”
He scowled harder. “Hard not to. It’s loud.”
She stepped closer. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said softly. “With Drew. Or Harry. Not the way you’re thinking.”
His jaw worked. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I know I don’t like watching you laugh with other men when I haven’t finished my shift. That’s all.”
She considered that. “Well,” she said lightly, “you’ll just have to get home earlier, then.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then huffed, the ghost of a reluctant smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. “You’re trouble,” he muttered.
“You invited me in,” she replied.
He shook his head and went back to his sharpening, but his movements were less harsh now, as if some tension had uncoiled.
None of the men ever said the word “love.” Not out loud.
Snow White, for her part, was careful not to examine her feelings too closely. What she felt for them was complicated: affection, gratitude, desire, occasional annoyance, a budding sense of belonging. But this was not what the stories had promised her.
It wasn’t that she didn’t care. She did.
When they came home late, hearts pounding from a near cave-in story, she clung to them harder than she meant to.
When one of them scraped a hand or bruised a rib, she fussed with salve and bandages until they squirmed.
When they grumbled and bickered over nothing, she smoothed their ruffled tempers like she smoothed sheets.
They had become her people—her allies, her family.