In reality? She said itforme. For herself. For the seventeen-year-old girl who fell in love and the twenty-eight-year-old woman who finally stopped pretending she hadn't.
She said it when I least deserved to hear it.
Hours after I'd cornered her. After I'd pushed. After I'd used Eleanor and Jedediah's story—the thing she trusted me with—like a weapon.
And she gave me those words anyway.
Not because I'd earned them.
Because she was finally ready to stop carrying them alone.
Today’s goal: get her alone so Ican hear it again.
The thought has a grin splitting my face until the harsh hammering of the goddamn knock of doom startles me upright in bed.
“Everett!” That’s Becky at the front desk, voice too bright and too high. “You need to see this. Now. Like, now now.”
I groan, scrub a hand over my face, and roll out of bed. Muscles protest. Certain parts of me stretch in a smug, satisfied way. I yank on sweats, a thermal, and the first flannel I grab off the chair.
When I open the door, Becky’s standing there in her Morgan Lodge fleece and Christmas leggings, eyes about three sizes too big.
“You okay?” I ask, because that’s what I’m supposed to do when my staff looks like they’re about to start screaming.
She blinks. Her gaze runs over my face. Whatever she sees there makes her flinch back a little.
“Oh my God,” she whispers. “You’re…happy.”
I frown. “Is that a problem?”
“No! I mean—yes. I mean—it’s weird. Lately things have been… you know what, never mind. It’s fine. It’s just…” She shakes herself. “You need to see outside.”
That wakes up the part of my brain that pays the bills. Weather. Liability. Transportation. The mountain never stops being dangerous, it just takes turns withhow.
“What happened?” I follow her down the hall, running my fingers through my hair since she didn’t even give me a chance to brush my teeth, let alone my hair.
“Just wait,” she says. “You’ll see.”
We hit the main landing, turn the corner, and?—
“Holy shit,” I breathe.
The world beyond the lodge’s glass front is white.
Not dusted. Not flurries. Buried.
It’s like somebody picked up the mountain and dropped it into the middle of a snow globe, shook until everything disappeared.
I walk straight to the window, press my palm to the cold glass. Snow is piled halfway up the railings on the front steps. The parking lot is a series of suspicious mounds. I can’t even see the main road, just a white blur where the plowed lane used to be.
“It wasn’t on any of the forecasts,” Becky says, hovering at my shoulder. “Last night it still said forty degrees and rain. Then at like three a.m. it all flipped. They’re calling it a freak band—lake effect meets pressure system, but we don’t have a lake so make that make sense. I don’t know—point is, highways are shut down in both directions. The county issued a travel advisory about forty minutes ago.”
“How bad?” I ask, even though I can already guess.
“Shelter in place if at all possible. No unnecessary travel, emergency vehicles only.” She swallows. “They had a plow try to come up the access road on the north side. It slid into a ditch.”
Perfect.
“Okay.” I blow out a breath, force my shoulders to loosen. “We’ve got generators. Firewood. Kitchen’sstocked. We prepped for full occupancy anyway. We can ride this out.”
