But I'd noticed she wasn't eating. Not just the eggs—anything. I'd left fruit on the counter yesterday afternoon, a sandwich at four o'clock, coffee at intervals that I told myself were casual but were actually timed. She'd picked at the fruit. Ignored the sandwich. Drank the coffee because Charlie Winters would drink coffee through the actual apocalypse. But the rest ofit sat there, evidence of a body that had stopped sending hunger signals because it was too busy processing catastrophe.
In Roatan, I'd had Carlos. I could tilt my head at a plate and food would appear at her workstation like magic, untraceable, requiring no acknowledgment. Here it was just me, badly cooking eggs in a house that echoed.
She ate half the plate. I counted it as a win.
The afternoon was long.Charlie spent most of it in the library—not reading, just sitting in the window seat with her knees pulled up, watching the aspens scratch the glass. I found reasons to walk past the doorway more often than was defensible. She didn't look up. She didn't need to. We both knew I was circling.
At four-fifteen, I was in my study pretending to review a construction bid when the doorbell rang.
It wasn't a sound this house heard often. I could count on one hand the number of times someone had pressed that bell—a FedEx driver once, a real estate agent who'd gotten lost, and Shane, who'd rung it seventeen times in a row on Christmas morning to make a point about my "hermit lifestyle."
I was already halfway to the door when I heard the second ring—impatient, two short jabs—and knew.
Shane didn’t walk into rooms so much as he took possession of them, efficiently and without announcement. He was already past the threshold, shrugging off his jacket with one hand and doing something with his phone with the other, and the energy in the house rearranged itself slightly around his presence the way it always did.
He’d been on a plane for four hours. He looked like he’d been waiting in an airport bar for two of them, which was probably true.
“House looks good,” he said. Which I knew meant that I looked like I had been eating, and sleeping. Shane was fluent in not saying what he meant directly, which was either something he’d learned from me or something he’d learned in spite of me. I didn’t want to think about which.
“You look like hell.” He squeezed my shoulder—brief, hard. “Where is she?”
"Library."
She nodded. Stepped aside.
And there she was.
Mia stood on my front porch in a puffer jacket and boots that were completely wrong for actual snow, overnight bag on one shoulder, and in her left hand—held out slightly, like a lantern or an offering—a gold box. Not small. The kind of box that said someone had walked into a chocolate shop and pointed at things until the box was full.
Just a woman taking the measure of the man who’d sent his assistant to find her at two in the morning and put her on a plane without asking if she was available.
"You made the eggs."
I looked at Shane. Shane held up both hands. "I may have mentioned the eggs."
"The eggs are fine," I said, to no one in particular, and Mia walked past me into the house with the chocolate held in front of her like a peace offering.
Charlie was in the library doorway.
She must have heard the voices, or the door, or maybe she just felt it—the shift in the air that happens when someone who loves you enters a building. She was standing there in my too-big socks and her wrong sweater, and she saw Mia, and she saw thegold box, and her face did something that I will never be able to describe adequately and will never forget.
"Oh," she said. Just that. A sound like the air leaving a room.
Mia set the overnight bag on the floor. Held up the chocolate with both hands now, ceremonial, ridiculous, exactly right.
"I brought the good stuff," Mia said. "The kind with the sea salt. And I brought myself. And I brought your favorite terrible movie on my laptop. And I'm not leaving until you eat something that isn't cooked by a man who apparently treats eggs like a construction project."
Charlie made a sound that was half laugh, half something broken, and crossed the distance between them in four steps and was in Mia's arms so fast the chocolate box got crushed between them. Mia held on. The gold box crinkled. Neither of them cared.
I watched from the hallway. Shane stood beside me, hands in his pockets, and for once in his life said nothing.
Charlie pulled back. Looked at Mia. Looked over Mia's shoulder at me. Her eyes were wet but they weren't the emptied-out wet like in Roatan. Something else. Something that had heat behind it.
"You did this," she said.
Not a question. I could hear what she meant underneath it—not "you flew my best friend to Aspen" but something larger and harder to hold.
I shoved my hands in my pockets. Looked at the floor. Looked at the ceiling. Looked at Shane's shoes, which were Italian and impractical and intact despite the slush.
