5. Penn
PENN
T he argument in my head has been running for five days.
I have, at various points, believed I was winning it. I have lined up every good reason I have. They're all true. Not one of them has done the only thing it needs to do, which is make this stop.
Here is what I keep telling myself:
I don't know her. She arrived in a storm, she's staying because the road was out, then because Fletcher started feeding her, and Fletcher's food is an argument I can't counter.
In a week she'll go north wherever she's going.
That'll be that. I have work. I have a life I built to be quiet and contained and free of surprises.
She is a surprise. I didn't see her coming and I don't know what to do with the fact of her.
And then:
She counted my place at the table.
That's it. That's the whole of it. I've been trying to talk myself out of it for four days and it won't go.
She's never met me. She set five places for dinner on her second day here.
She portioned five servings for lunch. She put the spare key for the mudroom door on the hook where the spare key goes—I heard Cory tell her where—and she moved it to the right hook, the one we actually use, without being told which one that was.
She reads rooms. She reads people. She's been reading this house for five days and she keeps counting me in.
I don't know what to do with that.
There's also this:
She fixed the kitchen drain.
I didn't see it happen. Fletcher mentioned it in passing, the way Fletcher mentions things he can't quite make sense of—he said she just knew what it was, from the sound —and I've been thinking about that since.
That's not a thing you know. That's a thing you learn by living somewhere long enough to know its sounds.
She learned a kitchen from its sounds. She grew up in a house that needed to be listened to.
I know that kind of house. I grew up in a house like that too.
I haven't been able to set it down. I haven't been able to set any of it down.
What I know about her so far: she's been on the road for nearly a month, alone, with a bag that's been getting lighter as she figures out what she actually needs.
She cooks for people she cares about. She fixes things without announcing it.
She's polite without performing. She counts people in before she knows whether they're staying.
Every one of them is a problem for the version of me that planned to watch her leave.
My office is the top floor, east-facing.
I built it that way on purpose—when Ronan was laying out the second story, I said east. He looked at me and said morning work or evening work.
I said both. He moved the window without asking anything else.
That's Ronan. He gives you what you need when you know what you need, and he doesn't require you to explain why.
I've been at my desk more or less continuously for five days.
I sleep on the narrow couch in the corner.
I eat what Fletcher leaves outside the door.
The work is real work—I have a firm, I have clients, I have three contracts in negotiation and a fourth that's been a problem since August. The work is a legitimate reason to be up here.
It is also, I am aware, a very convenient reason to be up here.
Eight-seventeen PM.
I hear her laugh.
It comes through the floor, up from the kitchen—I know the acoustics of this lodge as well as Ronan does, though he knows them structurally and I know them by sound.
Fletcher's voice, lower, saying something.
Then hers: a real laugh, surprised out of her, the kind that happens before you decide to let it.
I stop typing.
I've heard her laugh before. Three times on day three, twice on day four. I've been listening for it without meaning to. I don't want to look too hard at what that means—not yet, not until she's gone and it's safe to.
The thing is—and I want to be clear that I know this is not a reasonable thought—the thing is that she laughs differently with each of them.
With Ronan it's quieter, a kind of surprised warmth, like he said something she didn't expect from him.
With Cory it's barely a laugh at all, just a breath of it, the kind you share with someone in a private language.
With Fletcher it's the real one. The one I just heard.
Open, easy, like she's not monitoring anything.
I have been upstairs for five days. I know the shape of every laugh she has and I have never once been in the room when she made one.
I don't love what that says about me. I keep doing it anyway.
Nine PM. I come to the top of the stairs.
I don't know what I'm planning to do. I come to the landing and put my hand on the newel post and look down. The lodge is visible from here—the living room, part of the kitchen, the hallway leading to the guest room. The fire is going. The lights are low.
She's not in the living room. Faint sounds from down the hallway, her door open—she's moving around in the guest room. Sounds like she's getting ready for bed.
Ronan's at the table. He looks up. He sees me.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. His face does the thing it does when he already knows how something ends and is willing to wait for the rest of us to get there—patient, certain, in no hurry at all.
I go back to my office.
I stand in the middle of it and look at the desk, the work, the contract I've been staring at for six hours. The argument in my head has shifted. I'm less sure I was winning it than I was this morning.
She counted my place at the table.
She's never met me, and she set five plates.
I come downstairs at two AM.
I've been thinking about this—obviously—and two AM is the only hour I can be sure of not running into anyone. Ronan is asleep. Fletcher is asleep. Cory runs his perimeter at five. She goes to bed around ten.
The kitchen at two AM is mine alone.
It is not mine alone. She's at the table.
Both hands around a mug, looking out the window at a lot of dark and not much else.
She's in different clothes than she'd been in today—she must have extra things in her bag, or Fletcher found her something.
There's a book face-down on the table. She hears me on the third step from the bottom—I've always landed heavy on that step, something about the board—and she turns.
We look at each other.
"I thought everyone was asleep," I say.
"I thought everyone was asleep," she says.
A beat.
"Penn," I say.
"Bea," she says.
She turns back to the window. I stand in the kitchen doorway. The right thing to do—the thing I planned—is get my coffee, go back upstairs, and work. That was the plan. Get the coffee. Retreat. Keep the door shut between us, the way I've kept every door shut for three years.
I get the coffee.
I sit down.
I don't think about it. I sit down at the table, across from her, and we both look out the window at the dark, and after a while she says: "The ridge looks different at night."
"You've been to the ridge."
"Ronan took me yesterday."
I wrap both hands around my mug. Outside the window, the ridge is a dark line against a slightly lighter sky. I've been to the ridge in every season. I know it better than most places I know.
"Colder up there," I say.
"He brought an extra jacket." She pauses. "He just handed it to me. Didn't say anything."
"That's Ronan."
She nods. Turns the mug. The kitchen is very quiet.
I don't say anything else. She doesn't either. We sit in the quiet for another ten minutes, finishing our coffee. She says good night , takes her mug to the sink. I say good night . She goes back to her room.
I sit at the table for a while afterward.
The mug she used is in the sink. She rinsed it—she always rinses what she uses, without being asked. The fact that I know this is a whole additional thing.
The argument is still running. Six days of it now.
Six days of building reasons this can't be mine and watching every one come apart the next time she walks into a room.
She doesn't feel like a problem I have to solve.
She feels like the thing this lodge has been missing the whole time I've lived in it.
I know what Ronan thinks. I've known since day one—I saw his face when he stepped back from the door that first night.
I know what Fletcher thinks, which is that he's already past thinking and into knowing.
I know what Cory thinks, because I know Cory: he ran his perimeter twice that first morning.
He ran it twice. He never runs it twice.
They're all waiting for me to catch up.
The argument is not going to resolve tonight. I accept this, go back upstairs, and sit at my desk. The contract is still on the screen. I read the same paragraph four times.
She said the ridge looks different at night.
I close the laptop.