“Nobody could come up this way if theywantedto,” I mutter, stepping around her and toward the door. “You’ll be fine.”
“What aboutbears?”
I turn around, raising an eyebrow at her again. “You’re scared of bears? More specifically, you’re scared of a bear breaking into the cabin?”
“No…” she says, shifting side to side. “Where are you going? I’ll come with you.”
Now I raise both eyebrows, “Is that so? You don’t even want to know where I’m going?”
“I’m a quick learner. I’m sure whatever it is, I can be helpful. Plus, you did feed me. Maybe I could do something to pay you back.”
I can see in her eyes that there’s a hidden motivation here—her wanting to spend more time with me, wheedle information about this place out of me. See if I might be willing to sell.
The smart thing to do would be to tell her no thanks. That I’m not interested, and she’ll be perfectly safe in the cabin, bears and all.
But I can’t get the words to come out of my lips. Instead, when I open my mouth, I hear myself say, “Fine. But you’ll need something else to wear.”
CHAPTER 8
AMY
Idon’t know how Blue is so enthusiastic about being out here in the cold.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” I ask.
“It’s frozen solid,” Evan repeats, for the third time. “It’s completely safe, Amy. I wouldn’t let you come with me if it wasn’t. This thing will hold your weight—both of us. Hordes of us, if we came.”
If Kirstin or Mom saw me right now, they wouldn’t believe this. Me, standing on the edge of the water—ice—wrapped up in a snowsuit that’s slightly too small for me, and about to go on a frozen lake at the assurances of a stranger.
This was not in this week’s plan. In fact, something like this doesn’t show up anywhere in myfive-yearplan.
But I step out onto the large, white expanse anyway, heart pounding, my body flooding with adrenaline at the certainty that this ice is going to crack under my feet and send me plummeting into the icy water below.
“You’re good,” Evan says, his voice low and reassuring, when I finally waddle far enough out onto the ice that I’m next to him. “Don’t have to worry about this lake—entire week’s been sub-zero.”
“Right,” I say, because while I have a working understanding of how temperature affects water, it still feels perilous to be standing on a frozen lake. And it doesn’t make sense to me that the fish in this water could still be alive if we can walk around on top.
Ten minutes later, Evan and I are sitting side by side in a little shack. There are two holes in the ice, and I watch as he sets up two fishing poles. When he hands one over to me, I feel my eyes going wide, my stiff, near-frozen cheeks numb.
“What—for me?”
“That’s right,” he says, and with the way he’s handing it to me, so nonchalantly, like it makes the most sense in the world, I take it. My heart shouldn’t be skipping this erratically for something as simple as fishing.
Maybe it’s the way our legs are pressed together, though there are layers and layers of coat and thick fabric between us.
Or maybe it’s the fact that, even through his coat and the sharp, distinct smell of the water rising up through the hole, I can smell Evan’s aftershave, the same smell that was wafting through the cabin this morning alongside the bacon, eggs, and coffee, making my mouth water, something strange and intimate about learning someone else’s smell.
It could also be how, when we stepped outside the cabin this morning, I realized he’d cleared my car of snow and dug out a path behind it and all the way up to the road. Even thoughthe conditions are still too bad to drive—I heard it on the radio myself—he made a path for me to leave.
And when I popped my trunk, pulling out the emergency level-one charger for the battery, he didn’t waste any time in opening the door to his shed, running the wire through, and plugging it in for me.
“Give me one second,” he’d said, hefting up a chainsaw sitting near the door, “to put this away.”
“Did you use it recently?”
He’d shot me a cautious look, then said, “I went and took care of that tree this morning.”
He went and took care of the tree right away. He strikes me as the kind of man who doesn’t waste time with things. When we passed a tall lump covered in snow on our way down to the lake, I stopped, asking him about it.
