1. Mandy #2
The wind shoved at her back and then her side. Silk wrapped around her knees and pulled when she tried to step. She caught the hem, tore it higher, and kept climbing.
Her feet stopped feeling like feet. They became blocks she placed in the snow and trusted to hold her.
The cold stripped everything complicated out of her. Her father’s voice disappeared. The wedding disappeared. The careful assessment she had carried through every room of her life finally went quiet.
Move.
Up.
Not yet.
At the top of the ditch, her knees hit the field.
This time, she couldn’t make herself rise.
Then light came over the hill.
Two yellow beams moved across the snow, high and wide, with the dark mass of something large behind them. For one fractured second, Mandy thought she had begun seeing what freezing people saw at the end. Relief moved through her, almost sweet.
That frightened her enough to make her listen.
A diesel engine knocked beneath the wind.
A truck.
It stopped ten feet away.
The driver’s door opened. A man stepped down and came toward her through the snow.
He wore a canvas coat faded at the seams and a hat collecting white along the brim. He was broad through the shoulders, steady on the uneven ground, and entirely real. He carried no flashlight. His bare hands hung loose at his sides.
He stopped a few feet away and looked down at her without speaking.
Mandy got up.
She would not be found on her knees. It cost nearly everything she had left. Her legs shook so badly she almost fell again, but she planted her ruined feet in the snow and lifted her chin.
She gave him the look that had charmed senators and silenced caterers.
It had never before been attempted in a torn slip with loose hair and lips turning blue.
He looked at her feet first.
Then the slip. Her hands. Her face.
Something changed in his expression. Concern, perhaps, though it arrived without softness. He seemed to be deciding how badly hurt she was and how quickly he needed to move.
His eyes met hers. Gray-blue in the headlights. Very still.
He did not ask who she was.
The omission registered even through the cold. In Mandy’s world, a name came first because a name determined the response. This man looked at the blood on her feet and began there.
“You hurt?”
“Just my feet.”
“Anyone else in the car?”
“No.”
“Coat, wallet, phone? Anything you need in there?”
“No.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
He bent and lifted her.
Mandy tensed on instinct, but her body had little left to resist with. One arm braced her back. The other held beneath her knees. His canvas coat scraped her cheek when she turned from the wind, and heat trapped beneath it reached her face.
He smelled of cold air, leather, and hay.
The truck cab sat high off the ground. He carried her there without stumbling, set her on the passenger seat, and shut the door.
Warm air touched her legs. The sensation hurt.
For a moment, she sat alone in the humming cab while snow melted in her hair.
He climbed behind the wheel, pulled off his coat, and laid it over her before turning the heater all the way up.
The coat was rough, heavy, and warm from his body.
Mandy caught it closed at her throat with both hands.
The sleeves hung beyond her fingers. She could feel herself shaking inside it, violent enough to move the canvas.
He looked once at her feet.
“You need medical help.”
It wasn’t a question.
“No.” Her teeth knocked together. “I just need—”
She had no idea what she needed.
He waited.
Mandy looked out the windshield.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
The question had too many answers. She shook her head.
“Then why are you driving through a blizzard in barely anything and running into my fence?”
The old self rose inside her, battered but available.
“Your fence,” she said, “ran into my car.”
He let out the breath of a man whose night had acquired a problem he hadn’t asked for and could not leave behind.
Then he put the truck in gear.
The tires caught. The field began moving past the windows. Her torn fence and the dead car disappeared into the storm behind them.
“Marlow’s the other way,” Mandy said.
Being carried without consultation had been unavoidable. Being driven somewhere she had not chosen was harder to accept.
“Marlow’s twenty-two miles away, and the pass is closing.” He watched the white road ahead. “You’ll thaw out at my place, or you’ll thaw at the morgue. Your pick.”
Mandy pulled his coat tighter around herself.
He was infuriatingly correct.
Two days ago, women had surrounded her in a fitting room and told her she was the luckiest girl in Dallas. Now snowmelt ran from her feet onto a stranger’s floor mat, and she did not know his name.
He had looked at her hands and decided something.
She did not know what.
That uncertainty should have frightened her more than it did. He had asked whether anyone else was trapped. He had checked what she needed from the car. He had covered her before covering himself.
None of that made him safe. Safety was not a fact a woman could establish in ten minutes because a man had a warm truck and good questions.
It made him the safest thing available.
The truck climbed into the white. Mandy watched the road disappear behind them and stayed beneath his coat, because for tonight, going with him was the only choice she had left.