When I step outside, Ivy’s waiting by the truck, bundled in her marshmallow hat and a coat that looks like a duvet. She’s holding a reusable tote with “THIS BAG CONTAINS SNACKS” printed on it, which I assume is true.
“Seat warmers?” she asks, hopeful.
I grunt, which she apparently interprets as yes when the heat kicks on. “Remember,” I say as we pull out, “no faces.”
“Not even the elk head over your mantle?”
“There is no elk head over my mantle.”
“Darn,” she says. “I had a pun loaded.”
“Save it,” I tell her.
“Okay,” she says cheerfully, then folds her hands in her lap like someone who is trying very hard to follow the rules. We pass the square, where the big tree waits for the lighting tomorrow, and the Peppermint Inn, where Keely waves with both hands likewe’re a parade of two. Ivy waves back like she’s known her for years. The town likes her. I can tell. It’s both a problem and a solution.
The road turns from plowed to packed within a mile, then to dirt disguised as winter. Icicles spear down the rock cut, and the river throws gray light between the trees. Ivy is quiet in the way that makes me pay attention, and it’s not her thinking of puns quietly, it’s her recording with her eyes. She’s memorizing this and I don’t know why that sits fine in my chest, but it does.
“Cabin’s up there,” I say when we hit the last bend, pointing with two fingers on the wheel. “No neighbors close by, so don’t tell the internet where it is.”
She turns that on me. “I wouldn’t.”
I nod. My ears settle. We climb the last hundred yards between pines, tires biting, and the cabin comes into view: dark wood, metal roof, split-rail fence sketched in snow. I parked the truck this morning in such a way that an exterior shot will catch the corner of the porch and the stack of wood and not much else.
“Can I just say,” Ivy breathes, already reaching into her tote for the phone-and-stabli-thing, “this is…cinematic.”
“You say that like it’s a compliment.”
“It is,” she says, and for once there’s no sparkle glued to the words. Just truth.
I unlock the door and stand aside. She steps in, and I watch her see it the way people do when they’re trying to genuinely look: stove, boots, hooks, the rifle locked high and out of frame. I move to the trunk at the end of my bed, retrieve the quilt and lay it across the back of the couch.
“Perfect,” she whispers again, more to the room than to me. “We’ll end on the stove door. Close on the glow. Let the bells carry it.”
That should be my line. I let it stand.
She takes five shots in six minutes and tucks the phone away. “Thank you. I know this is…private.”
“It is,” I say.
“I won’t take advantage of that.”
“I know.”
And I do, which is the problem.
She looks around once more, not filming now, just looking. “You don’t decorate.”
“I don’t.”
“Not even a sad little Charlie Brown tree?”
“Nope.”
“Good,” she says, and I blink. “If you had a tree, people would think I made you put it up for the video. This way, it’s real.”
I huff something that’s not a laugh and notnota laugh. “You really think about the angles.”
“It’s my job,” she says softly. “And maybe the way I stay out of my own head.”
