“Shit,” she breathed, staring at the blinking blue screen like it had just revealed a countdown clock over her head.
My own phone buzzed inside my back pocket, but I didn’t look at it.
Couldn’t.
She swallowed. “It’s back.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly.
She felt it too. The shift. The dread. The reminder that the worldhadn't disappeared, it was just… waiting. And now it wasn’t anymore.
“It’s fine,” she tried to say, but her voice cracked halfway through it. She didn’t reach for her phone.
I didn’t reach for her.
But God, I wanted to.
Colette was staring at her phone where it sat on the table, screen lit with a name I hadn’t heard her mention. Not Josh. Someone else.
Her thumb hovered over the screen, frozen midair.
Everything in me strained to go still, to stay controlled. But all I could see was the way her face tightened, that same terrified softness I’d glimpsed in the quiet of the night, curled against me in the dark.
“Is it someone you need to call back?” I asked, and God — my voice sounded like gravel. That old instinct kicked in. The one that saidif she needs space, give it.Don’t crowd her. Don’t cling.
Her eyes lifted to mine. For a moment, she looked like she didn’t know me at all. Like all of this — the mess on the floor, our half-buttoned shirts, the flour prints on her thighs — was suddenly something fragile and stupid.
“It’s my sister,” she said quietly.
I wanted to be relieved. I wasn’t.
There were other names lighting that screen beneath it. Text bubbles stacked. One of them said"Answer me, Cole."
And it hit me, almost violently:
This cabin wasn’t a beginning.
It was apause.
“You should talk to her,” I said.
“I know.” Her voice cracked so slightly I nearly missed it. “I just… I don’t want to yet.”
She was shaking — not visibly. But I could feel it.
So I stepped toward her. She didn’t back up this time.
“Hey,” I murmured. “You don’t have to explain.”
But she started anyway. “I haven’t talked to anyone in… I mean, I basically vanished. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. And now it’s — what do I even say? ‘Hey, sorry, I had to run away and breathe for five minutes and got accidentally snowed in with some brooding, middle-aged author I’m not…notsleeping with’?”
The laugh that escaped her was too close to tears.
I reached for her then. Just grazed her wrist, a question I didn’t know how to voice.
“Does it feel like you’re still running, Colette?”
She didn’t pull her hand away. But she didn’t take mine either.
