"I'm fine," I tell Afon when he looks around in amazement, only to realize that I'm no longer as vertical as I once was. "I'm thriving, truly. Just leave me down here."
He grunts again and hauls me up to my feet. Then, when he's certain I'm not about to take another tumble, he turns and stomps through the knee-high snow drifts to the door.
I follow, grateful that he's carving through the snow that might otherwise swallow me. It's like a little personal highway on the side of this wind-blasted cliff.
To nobody's surprise, the door isn't locked. Why would it be? The only people who could find this place are Afon and God, and I'm not even sure God has the GPS coordinates.
Afon signals for me to wait. He steps inside and sweeps around, then nods over his shoulder that it's safe to enter.
Thank God, because my nips are hard enough to carveC+A=4everin the nearest tree bark. I duck through the doorway.
Inside, it's one room.
Although it's worth clarifying what "one room" means in this context, because I've toured studio apartments in Nolita that were technically "one room" and still managed to contain a Peloton and a breakfast nook.
This is not that. Not by a long shot.
This is "one room" the way a shoebox is "one room."
There's hardly enough room for the cast-iron stove in the corner, a rickety table that appears to have been assembled by someone who'd had a table described to him, once, over the phone, two slanted kitchen shelves, a kerosene lamp…
And a bed.
Onebed.
Singular. A narrow iron frame pushed against the back wall, topped with a mattress that is old enough to have witnessed the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
I stand in the doorway counting over and over. I'm no math genius, but even I know that two adults plus one massive dog does not jive with "one bed."
"There's only—" I start.
"I know," Afon interrupts.
Fine. Let's chalk that up as future Caroline's problem. Present Caroline has more immediate concerns, such as the fact that she can see her own breathindoorsand that her last twenty-four hours have included a kidnapping, an armed rescue, an emotional collapse on a stranger's floor, and two separate snowmobile journeys that would void any life insurance policy in the state of New York.
I am so deeply tired.
Afon hauls the duffel in and sets it on the table. He moves around the hut, checking the stovepipe, testing the window latch, glancing at sight lines. Wolf does his own circuit, nose to the floorboards, and then flops down by the door with awhumpthat shakes dust from the rafters, appointing himself head of security.
"Sit," Afon tells me, nodding at the bed. "Stay off the ankle."
"You know I'm not the dog, right?"
"I know," he agrees. "Wolf listens better."
I roll my eyes, but I sit, because (a) he's not wrong and (b) my ankle is currently impersonating a water balloon. The mattress crunches underneath me in a way I really don't like. I pull the wool blanket out of the duffel and wrap it around my shoulders and watch Afon kneel in front of the stove.
He builds the fire just as confidently as the one he did last night. There is something hypnotic about watching this man do anything with his hands. I'd watch him assemble IKEA furniture. I'd watch him do taxes. Dr. Levinson would have afield day with this, probably something about how competence reads as safety to my anxious attachment system, which then eroticizes it, but Dr. Levinson is two hundred miles away and her co-pay is forty dollars, so she can wait.
The match flares. The flame catches and spreads.
And that's when I see it.
When Afon leans forward to feed another stick of kindling into the stove, his jacket gapes open and rides up, and the hem of his sweater pulls away from his waistband, and there—just above his left hip—the gray wool is soaked through with a dark, rust-brown stain the size of my hand.
It's not mud. Mud doesn't bloom from the inside out. Mud doesn't have a darker center where it's stillwet.
"Afon."
