She just stood there, shovel in hand, watching as Nia slid into the driver’s seat, as the car reversed, as the tires bit into the slush and joined the line crawling down the mountain road.
The taillights glowed red for a few seconds. Then they were gone, swallowed by the glare of the sun on snow.
Ellis wiped his brow with his sleeve. “There goes the last of ’em. Guess we’ll have peace again.”
Soren stared at the empty road. “Yeah,” she said softly. “Peace.”
The word tasted like ash.
She set the shovel down, gloves hanging from one hand, and leaned against the porch railing. The view was beautiful—clear sky, sunlight skipping over the lake, everything sparkling like the world had been remade overnight.
It should have felt like relief. Instead, it felt like a door closing.
The cold bit at her fingers, but she didn’t move. She kept her eyes on the road long after the sound of engines faded, listeningto the drip-drip-drip of melting ice, to the steady, patient rhythm of a world moving on.
Only when the silence grew heavy again did she whisper it, almost to herself.
“Safe travels, Doc.”
Her breath turned to mist in the air and vanished.
By afternoon, Hawthorne Lake had thawed into a different kind of quiet. The storm was over, the roads open, the guests gone. Even the lodge felt hollow without the hum of voices, the shuffle of boots, the faint clink of coffee cups that had filled the last few days.
Soren stayed to help Ellis patch a loose shutter before driving down into town. The sunlight was sharp off the snow, dazzling, and the air smelled of pine and woodsmoke. Everything was supposed to feel normal again.
But it didn’t.
Her truck bounced along the slush-slick road, radio crackling with static between songs. She turned it off halfway down the mountain. The silence was better than the reminder that the world had kept turning while she’d been frozen in place.
Her workshop sat at the edge of town, a low building with a metal roof and a sign so faded it was barely legible:Stevenson Repairs – No Problem Too Small.The space greeted her with familiar smells—sawdust, oil, cold metal—but even that comfort felt thin.
She hung her jacket on the hook, plugged in the kettle, and stared at the scattered tools on her workbench. Normally she’d dive right in, lose herself in fixing something. A heater. A pipe. A broken hinge. There was always something to mend.
Today, she couldn’t focus.
She picked up a wrench, turned it in her hand, then set it down again. Her eyes fell on the old thermos she kept on the counter—two mugs beside it. One was hers. The other wasn’t.
The mug had been left behind at the lodge that morning, sitting by the sink. Plain white, chipped at the rim, the faint scent of Nia’s coffee still clinging to it. Ellis had set it aside for her.
“Guess the Doc forgot this,” he’d said. “You know where to send it?”
Soren had just nodded, pretending it didn’t matter. She’d slipped the mug into her bag without a word.
Now it sat on her workbench, too small and too clean among the clutter of tools.
She picked it up, running her thumb over the crack in the glaze.
She could mail it. Sheshouldmail it. Phoenix Ridge Hospital wasn’t hard to find. She could even picture the envelope—neat handwriting, maybe a note tucked inside:You forgot this.
But that wasn’t what she wanted to say.
What she wanted to write was:I can’t stop thinking about you.
What she wanted to ask was:Did you mean it when you said it wasn’t a mistake?
What she wanted to tell her was:I don’t want to forget you.
Instead, she just set the mug back down, careful not to chip it further.
