“Morning,” he said.
“Morning.” I sat on my stool. Accepted my plate. Ate his terrible eggs and didn’t say a word about them and thought: I am in serious, catastrophic trouble.
“You’re not stayingin this house.”
Mia said it at three in the afternoon, standing in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed and the expression she’d been using on me since the eighth grade, the one that meant my objections had been reviewed and found insufficient and I should save us both the time.
“I’m fine here.”
“You’re not fine. You’re turning into one of those women in a gothic novel who wanders around a man’s house in socks touching the furniture. We’re going out. Shane found a place.”
Shane, appearing from somewhere behind her with the inevitable glass of wine: “It’s not a place, it’s an institution. The 39 Degrees Lounge. I have it on excellent authority that their wine list is criminal and the bartender makes a martini that could end a marriage.”
“I don’t want a martini.”
“Nobody wants a martini until they’re having one,” Shane said. “That’s the entire business model.”
Asher was in his study. He’d been there most of the afternoon—calls, emails, the apparatus of his life reasserting itself after two days of being displaced by deck conversations and bad eggs and the other thing that had happened last night that I was not currently thinking about in the presence of his brother.
I looked toward the study door, which was half-closed. I could hear his voice—low, professional, the CEO register. The one that sounded nothing like the voice that had said “I’m here” in the dark.
“He’ll survive one evening,” Mia said, reading my look with the precision of a woman who’d been reading my looks for fifteen years. “Put on something that isn’t his socks and let’s go.”
So I went. Not because I wanted to leave the house but because Mia was right—I’d been circling the same rooms for two days, moving between grief and something that felt dangerously like happiness, and the combination was making me strange. I needed noise that wasn’t in my own head.
The 39 Degrees Lounge was the kind of Aspen establishment that looked like it had been there forever and had actually been redesigned last year by someone who understood that rustic meant reclaimed wood and copper fixtures, not actual decay. The lighting was warm. The music was low. The clientele was a mix of ski-season holdovers and locals who looked like they’d been coming here since before the remodel and were tolerating the improvements.
Shane walked in like he owned the place. This was, I was learning, how Shane walked into every place.
We were barely seated at a corner table when a woman appeared beside Shane and punched him lightly on the shoulder.
“You actually came back,” she said. “I owe Jax twenty dollars.”
“Sloane, my love, I told you I’d be back.”
“You tell everyone that. No one believes you.” She turned to us with a smile that was quick and assessing and warm underneath the assessment. Late twenties, maybe thirty, with dark hair pulled back in a knot and the posture of someone who’d either danced professionally or trained in something that required knowing where your body was at all times. “Hi. I’m Sloane. Shane’s been texting me all day about this, so I feel like I already know you.”
“Terrifying,” Mia said, offering her hand. “What did he say?”
“That his brother brought a woman home and it’s the first sign of the apocalypse and I should come witness it.”
“That’s almost exactly what happened,” Mia said. “I’m Mia. This is Charlie. How do you know Shane?”
We moved here last year. I know approximately four people, two of whom are bartenders, so when Shane texted I jumped at the chance for conversation that isn’t about snow conditions.”
She slid into the booth beside Mia like she’d known her for years, and I watched something happen that I’d only seen a few times in my life—the instant recognition between women who operate on the same frequency. Within ten minutes, Mia and Sloane were exchanging numbers and Sloane was telling a story about her husband that involved a surveillance detail gone wrong and a family of raccoons, and Shane was laughing so hard he was holding the edge of the table.
I drank my wine and let the noise wash over me. It was good noise. The kind that fills the spaces grief had hollowed out—not replacing it, just giving it somewhere else to be for a few hours.
Shane told the proprioception story again—Mia had heard the outline, but Shane’s versions always grew—and added details that were either true or spectacular inventions. The ski instructor was apparently “a former Olympian who wept openly.” The trash can “had to be retired from service.” Destry had sent Shane a bill for emotional damages, which Shane had framed and put in his bathroom.
“So,” Sloane said, turning to me during a lull. Her voice had shifted to something more private, pitched just for me under the general noise. “How’s the house?”
“Beautiful. Quiet.”
“Yeah.” She traced the rim of her glass. “Those men and their quiet houses. Jax was the same way. These big, controlled guys who build these perfect fortresses and then sit in them alone and call it a life.” She took a sip. “They don’t always know how to let you in. Even after they decide to.”
I looked at her. There was nothing pointed in her expression—no agenda, no advice being dispensed. Just the offhand observation of a woman who recognized the terrain because she’d already crossed it.
