Reid stands when I come out and takes the mug with both hands. "Thank you," he says, and looks directly at me when he says it. Not the kind of look that slides past or through a person. The direct kind. The kind I'm not accustomed to anymore.
"You're welcome," I say, and find somewhere over his shoulder to put my eyes.
Owen is finishing up the far end of the drive. He straightens when I approach, takes the mug, wraps both hands around it.
"Thank you. You didn't have to," he says. A pause. "I'm sorry we scared you yesterday."
"It's fine," I say. It’s not and we both know it.
He nods and doesn't push it.
Jace has the Subaru off the flatbed and the hood up. He takes the mug when I hold it out without looking away from the engine.
"It overheated," he says. "Coolant line was on its way out. I patched it, but." He finally looks at me. "I wouldn't trust this car."
I resent that. The casual assessment of the thing I saved for three months to buy, the car that represented the only mobile exit I had from a city that had turned hostile, reduced toI wouldn't trust it. I know he's probably right. What I know and what I can afford are two different things.
"Thank you," I say. In the tone that means the opposite.
He catches it. The corner of his mouth moves into a near smile. He holds my gaze a beat longer than necessary, and I hold it back, because I will not be the one who looks away first.
I look away first.
Damn him.
I take refuge inside and stand at the kitchen window with my own coffee and watch the three of them without letting myself appear to be watching. Reid works with his whole body, deliberate and efficient. Owen is quiet and methodical, finishing one section of the drive completely before moving to the next, the shovel scraping in even strokes. Jace moves in a more energetic way, hands busy, attention everywhere.
Remembering that Reid introduced them as neighbours, I set my mug down and go outside to question him.
"When you say neighbors…" I say to Reid through the open door.
"Further up the mountain." He's fitting the new door into the frame. The hardware he's brought is heavier than what was there before, a deadbolt that looks like it belongs on a vault. "Twenty minutes on foot." He glances over his shoulder. "Step back a little."
I step back. He lifts the door and guides it into the frame with one smooth motion, the weight of it obvious and the effort invisible. The muscles in his forearms tighten and hold. It seats into place on the first try.
Clean. Solid. The sound of something that will hold.
"You're all set," he says.
The Subaru starts up from the drive. Owen is already stacking the shovels in the truck bed, handles aligned, the same quiet precision he applied to the snow now applied to the cleanup. Jace drops the hood with a sound that carries in the cold air.
"We'll leave you to it," Reid says. "Anything comes up, we're up the mountain."
They pack up. They leave.
Then nothing.
The cold is very clear and very quiet.
I go inside. I close the door behind me. The lock catches on the first try, solid and certain.
The cabin is mine. Quiet. Exactly what I crossed two thousand miles to find.
I stand in the middle of it with both hands around my mug and wait for that to feel like what I thought it would feel like.
The coffee goes from hot to warm in my hands.
Then cool.
