Chapter 7
Sullivan
The storm hits like a hand slapping the side of the cabin.
I’ve been in worse. I’ve been in cold that took fingers off men I was carrying. Wind that turned a tent inside out at four a.m. on a hill in another country. This is not the worst storm I’ve stood inside.
But it’s the first one in a long time I’m sharing with anyone.
We eat stew at Tess’s kitchen table. She’s lit two candles and a kerosene lamp because, in her words, the cabin’s wiring is “vibes,” and the vibes do not include any breaker she trusts in a wind like this.
She’s wearing a thick cream cardigan over the daffodil sweater and a pair of woolen socks pulled up to her knees, telling me a story about her brother teaching her to drive in a parking lot in Rhode Island when she was fourteen.
I laugh in the right places while the storm does what storms do, and somewhere deep in my chest, something settles.
A crack.
Sharp. Different. Not a hawk. Not a branch. The kind of crack that has a tree on the end of it.
I’m up before the second crack. “Tess.”
“What was that?”
“Tess, get to the front of the cabin. Now.”
She doesn’t argue. She moves, my hand at the small of her back without remembering putting it there. We’re out at the front door when the second crack comes—a long, slow, sickening shudder.
Then a third sound, the one I knew was coming. The cabin lurches as a sixty-foot pine crashes into it.
Tess yelps, but she doesn’t scream or panic as I bundle her under my arm like a sack of grain and sprint off the porch, down the steps.
The snow is falling sideways, and the wind is icy and mean as we make our way to my cabin on foot, hand in hand, up the slope I know so well I could walk it in the dark.
A hundred yards. The longest hundred yards of my life.
Tess doesn’t falter. I automatically shorten my stride for her shorter legs, but she keeps up, her hand a fist in mine, her other arm wrapped around her own ribs against the cold.
We reach my porch, and I shoulder the door, closing it behind us and dropping the bar. The cabin is warm where I left the stove burning.
Tess stands in the middle of my front room, snow on her hair, her glasses fogged completely, her cheeks the wrong kind of red.
“Off.” I’m already pulling at her cardigan. “Wet stuff off. You’re soaked.”
Her teeth chatter. “C-cold.”
“Yeah, you are. I’ve got you.”
I tug her cardigan off. The daffodil sweater is mostly dry, so I sit her on the rug in front of the wood stove. Dumping three logs in, I push the damper open, and the wood stove leans into its job like a horse pulling its cart up a hill.
“Tess, look at me.”
Her glasses are off, in her hand, and she’s breathing hard but evenly. Her color is coming back.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Anywhere?”
“No, Sullivan, I’m fine. I just…” She lets out a breath like a deflating balloon. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” Her face crumples. “Sullivan, my stand mixer.”
A real laugh punches out of me from nowhere, half from relief, half from the absurdity of a woman whose roof has eaten a tree and whose first conscious thought is the kitchen appliance.
“Your stand mixer,” I repeat.
“It was on the counter.”
“Tess.”
“I know.”
“Tess. Tomorrow, we’ll go down. We’ll assess. If it’s buried under a tree, I’ll dig out your stand mixer.”
“Personally?”
“Personally.”
“With your own hands.”
“With my own hands, Tess. Stop crying.”
“I’m not crying about the stand mixer.”
“I know you aren’t.”
“I’m crying because you would dig out my stand mixer.”
“Yeah.” My voice is rough. “I’d dig out your stand mixer.”
She wipes her face with both hands and laughs, hiccupy and watery. She’s sitting on my wood stove rug in two pairs of damp wool socks and her glasses are in her lap and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in this room—the room I’ve been hiding in for forty-three days.
I make her tea.
I don’t give her the blue mug. The blue one is mine. I have a second mug, plain white, that came with the cabin, which I’ve used exactly once. I use it now, pouring boiling water over a tea bag, adding milk and sugar, and handing it to her.
As Tess wraps her fingers around it, her shoulders soften. “Thank you.”
I sit on the rug near her, not next to her, but not far. I put my back to the front of the wood stove platform, stretch my legs out, and take my own mug. We sit, the two of us on a rug in front of a fire while the storm batters the cabins on the ridge.
Tess is silent for a long time.
“Sullivan.”
“Mm?”
“Is this where you sleep?”
She’s looking past me to the only door in the cabin that’s closed.
“Yeah.”
“Just one room?”
“Loft above. Mattress on the floor.” I look at the loft ladder. “I sleep down here, mostly. The first month I was up here. The loft is…” I shrug. “I sleep with the door in my line of sight. It’s a thing.”
She doesn’t say anything about that. She just nods slowly.
“You can sleep in the loft,” I say. “I’ll take the floor down here.”
“No.”
“Tess—”
“No, Sullivan.” She doesn’t look up from her tea. “I’m not sleeping alone in your loft while you spend a night on this floor on principle. We have a fireplace and a rug, and I am asking you to sit with me until I’m warm. Then we will figure out the sleeping arrangements like adults.”
“Like adults.”
“Like adults.”
“All right.”
“All right.”
I sit.
The storm rages outside. The fire pops. The mug of tea in her hand goes from full to half to empty when she sets it carefully on the rug beside her.
At some point, she’s tipped an inch at a time, and her shoulder is against my arm.
I don’t move a muscle to encourage it, but I don’t move away to discourage it either.
She’s the warmest thing I’ve touched in five years. I’m working very hard to be grateful only for the warmth. Only for her alive and breathing. I’m mostly succeeding. I intend to keep trying.
“Sullivan.”
“Mm.”
“Tell me about your Henry.”
I think for a long time before I start.
“He sat across a table from me at the Spur and Spoon diner in Havenstone, the second day after my discharge. Hands flat on the table. He asked me two questions.”
“What were the questions?”
“What do you need today? What do you need this week?”
Tess makes a small sound against my shoulder, like a hum of approval. “Not long-term. Not what do you need to be okay.”
“No.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I said I was the kind of broken that didn’t yet know how to receive help.”
“What did he say back?”
“He said, ‘Yeah. Eat your soup.’”
She breathes out shakily. “Beef and barley.”
I stiffen against her. “How’d you know?”
“It’s a beef-and-barley story, Sullivan.”
A laugh comes up out of me, surprising us both.
“Tank runs the lumberyard, where I work. And he’s a part of the veteran’s program at Havenridge Ranch.”
“You like him.”
“Yeah, I like him.”
The fire crackles, and the storm pulls at the eaves.
Tess lifts our joined hands and presses my knuckles to her mouth, her breath warm and steady against my skin. “Tell me about your team. And your call sign.”
“I was the senior. I had three other men. They used to joke that I had eyes in the back of my head.”
She doesn’t ask the question I can’t answer. She doesn’t ask for names. She holds my hand to her mouth and waits. I haven’t been touched gently in so long that my body is having to learn, in real time, that touch can mean something other than triage.
I take a breath. Another.
“Davis,” I say finally. “And Hooper. Hooper made it home. That’s all I have tonight.”
“That’s all you need to have tonight.”
We’re quiet for a long time after that, her head on my shoulder, my hand in her hair. Two people on a rug in front of a fire while a storm tears a hole in the side of a ridge.
At some point, she sleeps.
I don’t. I sit there with my arm gone numb and her hair under my chin and the wood stove low and the wind taking a long, cold turn around the eaves, and I think…
There it is.
That’s the line.
And I’ve just crossed it.
I don’t know yet what I’m going to do about it.
What I do is shift slowly and carefully until I’m lying on my back on the rug with her tucked up against my side. I pull the wool throw off the back of the couch and over us. My boots stay on, the door in my line of sight, my hand at the small of her back as if it belongs there.
Tess makes a small, sleepy sound and presses her cheek into the wool of my flannel.
And in the safest cabin on the ridge, with a tree in her kitchen and a storm at the windows, I sleep through the night for the first time in years.