A few minutes later, she bursts back in, toes off her boots, and shakes out her hair. “Think I got some good ones. Give me a second to load them on the computer.”
“Use mine,” I say.
She blinks. “Really?”
“All yours. I’m invested after watching you out there.” Really, I want to see what could pull her outside half-dressed in a flurry. The show was a bonus.
She blushes, and she leads me across the house to my office. I doubt she even notices she’s slightly shivering, so I leave only long enough to grab a blanket to wrap around her shoulders.
By the time I’m done, she’s already beaming from ear to ear. “Check it out.”
I stoop to look at the screen and freeze. “How did you—” The snowflake fills a third of the screen, crystalline and perfect.
“I’m going to nerd out,” she warns, already glowing. “Flakes form in the clouds. Temperature and humidity change their shape—” Click. A new flake, wildly different. “They start as hexagonal prisms, shoot branches, and get more complex the closer they are to freezing.”
“It’s nerdy,” I say, “and a little sexy.”
Her ears pink. “I’m a walking encyclopedia, so be careful what you wish for.”
She keeps clicking, one snowflake after another. All different, just like Phoebe said.
As she continues, the images shift to Opening Day shots—kids caught mid-jump while parents cut a tree, an older couple with cocoa, friends I grew up riding the tubing hill with every January.
Moments frozen in time of people passing through our farm, past and present colliding. Chloe is giving me a gift I never even knew to ask for: a viewpoint of what everyone else sees while they’re here.
Whispering Pines Tree Farm through her eyes—that same wonder I’ve observed since the minute I saw her again.
“These are incredible,” I manage, voice thick.
“Did I overdo it?” she asks, eyeing me over her shoulder. “Sometimes I get carried away and forget it’s not always my place.”
“No. This is a gift,” I say, tugging her up so I can hold her. “I get so caught up in logistics, I forget. I love seeing what you see.”
“It’s another perspective, Aiden. You saw it this way once—you’ll see it this way again.”
I thread my fingers through hers. She’s been stitching me back together since she walked through the door, and I wish I knew if I’m doing the same for her. She deserves the same.
“You’re helping me with that,” I murmur. “I don’t know how to return the favor.”
“Well, you gave me a whole barn.” She sighs, smiling. “I don’t think you can top that.”
“You’re sure?”
“Maybe I could be convinced,” she whispers, reaching for my face, then pulling my mouth to hers.
She tastes like marshmallow lip balm, her lips soft and steady against mine.
I’m really loving the new agreement we made yesterday, and not just because she’s showered me with affection over the last twenty-four hours. I like to think I’ve probably done the same.
But it feels like a curtain lifted and we’re living a life, not fulfilling a contract. And I hope it stays this way.
“Show me the rest,” I whisper against her lips when we pull away from each other.
She smiles, then arranges us so I’m sitting, and she’s draped across my lap so we can both see the screen. As she keeps clicking, something settles in my chest. A sense of calm that follows surviving something hard.
Opening Day didn’t break me, and letting her in didn’t erase what came before.
It added to it.
