"No." I push up off the blanket, ankle be damned, until I'm standing in the snow in front of him. "You don't get to hand me a crumb and call it a meal.I didn't like it.You know whatIdidn't like? I didn't like being kidnapped. I didn't like a zip tie cutting into my wrists in that bunkhouse. I didn't like watching you bleed through your sweater for fourteen miles because asking for help is more frightening to you than dying." My breath saws white between us. "But I survived all of it, because I thought—stupid me—that there was a person under all this granite who might, eventually, say something real to me. But you don't. You won't. Again and again, you refuse. So I'm just gonna stop asking."
"You don't know what you're asking for," he warns. "You think you want the rest of me. You don't."
"That's not your call!" The shout tears out of me, ragged and hot. "You've been deciding thingsforme since the second I cracked my head open on your mountain. You decided I should leave. You decided everyone in that diner was a hitman, that I couldn't talk to a man forforty seconds, that I should sleep on frozen dirt instead of a real bed, that I should starve up here with you rather than make one phone call on the phone youthink I don't know about."
His whole body goes rigid.
There it is.
The truth, for once in his damn life.
"Yeah," I breathe. "I found it. In your jacket." My voice climbs and I can't stop it, don't want to stop it. "So don't you stand there and twist that ring at me and tell me youcare,that you didn'tlike it,while you've got a way out of this whole nightmare sitting in your pocket the entire time and you'd rather drag me through a blizzard than push one button. What's so scary about it, huh, Afon? What is so terrible about that phone that you'll let me freeze, you'll let yourselfbleed out,rather than dial it?"
He doesn't answer.
"That's what I thought," I snap. "You'll do anything for me except for the two things that matter most: You won't tell me the truth, and you won't let me in.
The snow hisses through the spruce. The unlit match is still in his hand. He has not moved an inch, and that stillness is themost infuriating thing about him, because I know now that it isn't calm. It's a man holding a door shut with his entire body.
"You're a coward," I tell him. "Because you'd rather take a bullet across the hip than a question across the heart. And I amdonebegging you to show me what's on the other side. Keep your half-inch, Afon. I'd rather have nothing than starve on your scraps."
I turn my back on him before he can see my face do the thing it's about to do.
The match scrapes. Catches.
I don't look at the light.
25
CAROLINE
The fire takes. I hear it catch and grow, the little spit and pop of dry spruce surrendering to flame. But I refuse to turn around and warm myself by it, because that would be admitting I need him.
So I stand there with my back to him and my arms wrapped around myself, shaking, watching my own breath disappear into the dark.
Behind me, I hear him stand. The crunch of his boots in the snow.
"Caroline, can we talk?"
"Spare me, Afon," I cut him off. "I mean it. I'm all out of room for whatever bullshit you're about to throw my way."
"I only wanted to say that you were right."
I turn around.
He's standing maybe two feet away, the firelight catching one side of his face and leaving the other in dark. The blood at hiship has gone tacky and black in the cold. His hair is wet with snow that won't melt anymore, and his eyes are open. Open as inopenopen, both physically and emotionally. None of thatfuck offconcrete poured over the top.
"I—what?"
"You're right." He says it again, slower. "About all of it. Every word. I've been making decisions for you for a while now. I chose everything for you without once asking whatyouwanted. I think I was afraid that asking would mean you might answer, and that I wouldn't be ready for what you might say."
The snow keeps coming down between us. I don't trust this. I've trusted half-inches before and watched them slam shut. Fool me twice, et cetera.
"Why?" I say.
He doesn't pretend not to understand. He's done pretending; I can see it in the set of his shoulders. They've come down from around his ears for the first time since the diner.
"Because the day I let you decide for yourself is the day I have to admit you might decide to leave."
