Jake scrambled up the embankment, his dress shoes slipping in the slush until he made it to the asphalt. Once there, he looked at the vehicle, thinking,if you were a horse, I’d have to shoot you.
He turned his collar up, put his head down, and started walking toward Spoon.
Holiday Pines Farm
5:30 PM
The farmhouse felt like a tomb.
The power had failed at 3:45 PM, taking the hum of the refrigerator and the whir of the furnace with it. Now, the only sounds were the wind howling around the eaves and the terrifying, erraticCRACK-POPof trees shattering in the orchard.
Every snap echoed like a gunshot.
Wes stood at the living room window, staring into the void. He couldn’t see the trees, but he could feel them dying.
“That was a big one,” Henry murmured from the darkness behind him.
“Sounded like a white pine,” Wes said, his voice flat. “Maybe near the barn.”
“Generator?”
“Fuel line’s frozen. I can’t get it primed.”
Wes resumed his pacing. Eight steps to the fireplace. Eight steps to the window. He was wearing his coat inside thehouse, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, clenching and unclenching.
Henry was buried under a mountain of quilts in his recliner, pushed dangerously close to the fireplace. The orange glow of the embers cast deep, dancing shadows on his face, turning his wrinkles into canyons. He looked frail. He looked exactly as he had five years ago, the night Wes’s mother died.
“You’re gonna wear a hole in the rug, Wesley,” Henry said.
“He should be here,” Wes said, ignoring him. “He left Atlanta at noon. Even doing thirty miles an hour, he should have been here by four.”
“Roads are slicker than owl shit, son. Maybe he stopped at a motel in Macon. Or Jackson. Smart thing to do.”
“He wouldn’t stop,” Wes said, the words tearing out of him with a violence that surprised them both. “He said he’d be back.”
“Plans change, Wes. People get scared.”
“Not him.” Wes checked his watch for the hundredth time. 5:35 PM. “Something’s wrong. I can feel it.”
He grabbed his keys off the mantel. The metal was cold.
Henry sat up, the quilts rustling. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m taking the truck. I’m gonna look for him.”
“You’re going to risk the truck? In this?” Henry’s voice rose, sharp with disbelief. “We might need the truck. You’re going to wreck our only transport for a banker?”
Something inside Wes snapped. A tension wire that had been holding him together for a decade—through art school rejection, through cancer treatments, through strokes and storms—finally frayed and broke.
He spun around.
“He’s not just a banker, Pop!” Wes shouted. The sound rang off the low ceiling beams. “He’s not a guest. I love him, okay? I’m in love with him.”
Henry went still.
“I love him,” Wes repeated, his voice cracking. “And if he is in a ditch somewhere freezing to death while I stand here warming my ass by the fire, I will never forgive myself. I will never forgiveyou.”
The silence that followed was stark, irreversible, like the first crack in a frozen lake.
