“You’re welcome.”
I look up at him, snow lacing his hair. He stares back down, an entire conversation locked in his eyes.
“You going to drive by again?” I ask.
He considers lying. He doesn’t bother. “Yeah.”
My mouth curves. “Okay.”
The admission puts a raw, unguarded satisfaction on his face that is pure trouble for a woman trying not to fall back into a fire she barely crawled out of once.
“Good night, Ax,” I say, soft.
His eyes flare at the name. He steps up one tread, close enough that the heat rolls off him, not close enough to do anything about it. His hand lifts like it has its own mind, hovers an inch from my cheek, then falls.
“Night, Savannah.”
I unlock my door and slip inside before I test my own restraint to failure. I lock it. Put my forehead to the wood. Breathe.
Through the peephole, I watch him walk back to the truck. He pauses at the end of my path, looks up at the porch light one last time, then at the bedroom window like he can see straight through the curtains to the pulse in my throat. He shakes his head at himself, a tiny, disbelieving smile breaking like dawn across his mouth.
Then he gets in and drives away.
Ten minutes later, the truck rolls by again. Slower. A little cocky this time, like we’ve both stopped pretending we don’t know what we’re doing.
I let myself smile in the dark.
The porch light stays steady all night.
Chapter Seven
Axel
Sun on fresh snow always looks too bright, too pure, a white sheet thrown over a mess and called beautiful. The peaks cut hard against an impossible blue sky, and Devil’s Peak wears last night’s storm like new armor. Cold slides under my collar; the air tastes like metal and pine.
I’m signing off a maintenance log when I feel her.
Savannah steps out of the side entrance with a coffee the size of my fist and cheeks flushed from the walk from her rental. She stops on the top step, scanning the valley like she’s measuring it, then pushes her hair back with a gloved knuckle and looks straight at me.
There’s a split second where everything goes silent—no engines, no banter, no clatter of tools. The world tightens to her breath in the cold and the way sunlight threads her hair gold.
Then the past moves.
Not walking. Not running.
Arriving. All at once.
I see a girl with paint on her fingers because we were making signs for the winter carnival—hers neat, mine a disaster—and she told me it didn’t matter if the letters were crooked becausecrooked looks charming. I see a boy with blood on his knee because he tried to jump the river from the wrong rock and she pressed gauze to the scrape with the focus of a surgeon, telling me to hold still while she blew my hair out of my eyes. I hear her laugh from a sled, hear her mother singing badly to carols while cinnamon burned in the oven, hear my mother and hers at the table debating whether tinsel was tacky or classic until we fell asleep under a quilt that smelled like cedar.
My throat locks.
I set the clipboard on the bumper before I drop it.
She comes down the steps slowly, like she’s remembering how to walk in a place where the ground used to move under us. Frost squeaks under her boots. The sun glances off her cheekbones. When she reaches the bottom step, she pauses, a breath catching, eyes flaring the way they do when she’s about to push through something sharp.
We stop two yards apart.
Close enough to feel her body heat. Far enough to pretend this is casual.
