“Are you okay with being here?” he asked after she tucked herself into his side and sighed with contentment.
She nodded. “If you told me a month ago what would happen in my life, I would’ve called you insane.” She didn’t speak for a long time after that. “Life has a miraculous way of happening the way it’s supposed to happen. I can’t imagine being anywhere else, not with the way things have played out.” She glanced up at him. “Are you okay? I’m the one invading your life, your home, and your immediate future.”
He felt relaxed and comfortable. Safety lay over this place like another blanket, letting him breathe deeper. “I am. I hate that the reason you’re here is because of a faked video and a warrant for your arrest.”
“Are those the only reasons I’m here?” She dropped her head to his shoulder and batted her eyes at him.
He stared down at her. “No. I want you here. If I didn’t, you’d be in a safe house in Europe with trusted agents watching you. But the warrant and the video were the impetus for the arrangement. I wish it could’ve been of your own volition.”
She sat up and turned to face him. “Being here is of my own free will. Mr. Sawyer asked if I wanted a safe residence in New York. He said it would be like a victim-witness program but run by Guardian. I told him I would stay with you as long as you wanted me to stay.”
That would be until hell froze over, but he didn’t want to change the balance they had now. Blake stood up and extended his hand to her. “It’s getting colder. Let’s go inside.”
She chuckled and stood up. “That’s code for let’s go to the bedroom.”
“Or the living room.” He dropped his arm around her. “Ever make love in front of a roaring fireplace?”
“No.”
“Then it’s about time we do that.”
Rain and sleetsettled in the next day, steady and patient, tapping the metal roof with quiet consistency. The cabin’s silence did not feel like a lack of anything, though. It felt like a pause taken on purpose. While the weather hemmed them in, they opened cupboards and found what life there had left behind. He explained he sometimes loaned out the cabin to close family. People he trusted to take care of it and not expose where he lived to others.
Elise lined a drawer with parchment and organized a short legion of mismatched forks, spoons, and knives. Blake took inventory of what he kept for storms: candles, batteries, sealed tins of coffee, the first-aid kit he always refreshed, and a radio stacked beside extra water jugs. He moved as he always moved, methodically, but his shoulders had relaxed a fraction, and that fraction changed everything. He felt light and unencumbered by the usual worries. Elise had done that for him, just by being at his side. He paused and glanced at her.
She was elbow-deep in organizing a very poorly arranged kitchen. He now understood why his father looked at his mom with such adoration and why he said that his mom had saved his life many times over. And now that he got it, the revelation was humbling. Some people were meant to be in your life, and he firmly believed Elise was supposed to be in his. Hopefully, she would come to that conclusion, too. Time would tell.
By late afternoon, the sleet had blurred the windows into a frosted watercolor. Elise stood at the stove. The sleeves of that soft pink sweater she’d admired were shoved up as she stirred a heavy pot with a wooden spoon. The scent of beef, onion, and rosemary filled the house when he brought in an armful of wood for the fireplace. He paused on the mat and toed off his boots, then stepped to her and slid one arm around her waist. The warmth of the small house was due to more than the fireplace or electric heat pumping from the vents. It came from her presence.
October slid forwardlike a page turning in an old book. Mornings arrived pale and clean, frosting the edges of fallen leaves. She was enthralled with the lake, and Blake taught her how to read the water when the surface froze. He showed her how to test thickness, where the sun kept water loose, and how a careful step could become a source of knowledge. He realized that they were learning from each other in the same way. One careful step at a time.
When she was cleaning one day, she found the small drawer where he kept letters he’d never opened or answered and a second drawer where he kept blades so sharp they looked like shadows. She didn’t open either without asking. When she did ask, he didn’t hide anything. He showed her the letters that the one who’d told him he was too hard to love had sent after they’d broken up. He hadn’t opened them and didn’t care what they said.
“Do you trust me?” she asked, holding the pile of envelopes.
“Absolutely.”
She stood from the couch and walked over to toss the letters into the fire. “She was wrong, and I’ll bet my right arm thatshe realized it. She wanted you back. You don’t need her or her letters. You aren’t hard to love; she just didn’t know how to love you.”
He leaned back into the cushion, and she returned to her seat next to him, and together, they watched the paper curl and spark-filled flakes fly up the chimney. “Thank you,” he said as they sat hand in hand. He didn’t know why he’d kept the letters. Perhaps it was to remind him that he wasn’t easy. But her simple act of burning the past released a shackle that had bound him without his knowledge.
They walkedthe property line together, winter boots biting into frost-covered forests. Elise matched his stride and let silence linger between them for most of the walk.
“What does peace cost you?” she asked as a flock of birds flew overhead.
He considered his answer before responding because she deserved it. “Attention,” he said. “It costs attention. Peace is the absence of danger.”
“Do you ever get afraid?” she asked.
“Only if I think about you leaving,” he said, and the truth of it surprised him so much he had to stop. She slipped her gloved hand into his. They stood that way and watched the birds circle the frozen lake.
“I’m not going anywhere.” She whispered the words, but he heard them.
Nights gathered early in November.The cold set deep into the ground, and the fireplace earned its keep as the house learned their habits. Elise claimed the round table by the window as her desk, and notes bloomed across it like small continents. She built a corkboard from a sheet of pine and a handful of brass tacks and hung it where afternoon light fell warm. She sorted a stack of wool throws she’d found at a secondhand store in the small town down the road and shook them out on the porch before hanging them outside until they smelled of nothing but clean air. He’d tried to get her to go to the other stores, but she steadfastly refused. “Why waste money? Growing up, we didn’t have much, and I’ve become frugal. My choice of career didn’t pay well, and I learned to see the beauty in what others no longer want.”
Blake repaired the back steps, resealed the north windows, and moved a trail camera to catch a gap in the trees that had been formed by an old pine falling. He returned to find her kneeling on the rug beside the hearth, threading dried oranges and cranberries on thread. Sun lit her hair. She looked up, a little guilty.
“Too soon?” she asked, glancing at the pine boughs waiting in a basket.
