Cole spoke first.
“We’re not going anywhere tonight.” His voice was plain and certain, no elaboration offered, no promise dressed up beyond the fact of it. It had the quality his words had when he had already examined them from every angle and found them accurate.
Rhett’s hand pressed slightly firmer on my shoulder. “None of us are moving an inch,” he said. The drawl was in it, but nothing else that usually accompanied the drawl, no angle, no self-deprecating edge, no exit built into the sentence. Just the statement, given to the room without a joke to follow it.
Wade did not speak.
He moved his hand from where it had been resting on his own knee and turned it palm-up on the floor between us. His fingers were slightly open, his palm broad and still in the amberlight of the nearest lantern, the gesture saying precisely what it said without requiring anything further.
I looked at it.
The fire breathed in the hearth. A gust hit the south wall and the house answered it with the low, full-body sound of a structure being tested, and the lantern flames tilted west and straightened again. I looked at Wade’s open hand for a long moment, at the familiar topography of it, the steadiness of it, just sitting there with no demand attached.
Then I placed my hand in his.
His fingers closed around mine, unhurried and complete, and the warmth of his grip traveled up through my wrist and into the cold that had settled in my forearm without my noticing. His thumb moved once across my knuckles, barely a movement, and went still.
The storm howled.
It found every gap in the old house and used it, the draft running along the baseboards and the cold pressing through the glass in its patient, indifferent way, and the fire pushed back against it with the steady orange authority of something that had made its own decision about the night. The lanterns held their warm, unsteady circles. Cole fed the fire. Rhett’s hand stayed on my shoulder. Wade’s grip stayed in mine.
Nobody slept.
The hours went the way hours went in a blizzard, without their ordinary markers, the dark outside undifferentiated from midnight to three to five, the storm making its own time. The house creaked and the lanterns moved in the drafts and the fire worked its long, slow work, and the four of us stayed where we were on the floor and in the chair and against the sofa whilethe snow piled against the windows and the wind made its sustained, enormous noise, and the sitting room held its warmth against all of it, and we held ours.
Outside, the mountains were somewhere in the white.
They were there, as they had been before any of this and would be after, patient and enormous in the dark behind the blizzard. I could not see them. I knew them anyway, the specific jagged outline of the Sawtooth range that I had been looking at my whole life, and I thought of the road above Hargrove’s property with no guardrail on the east side, and I thought of Cole’s words settling in the warm air of the room like something set down and left, and I pressed my hand flat against Hope and I held onto Wade’s hand and I watched the fire burn.
The storm did not relent.
But the lanterns held, every one of them, their small flames enduring in the old glass housings, the amber light steady on the walls and the ceiling and the four faces turned toward the fire, and the night went on around us in its cold and furious way, and none of us were going anywhere.
Chapter Twenty-one – Lila
The contraction started low. A pulling ache somewhere below my hips, the kind I had been dismissing all evening, filing it alongside the fire’s low crackle and the wind’s sustained assault on the windows as simply one more thing the night had decided to offer. I had been standing at the kitchen counter for the better part of twenty minutes, both hands braced against the edge, breathing through it in the particular way of a woman who had decided she was not ready to be the thing that alarmed anyone yet.
Outside, the blizzard pressed its full weight against the old glass. The kitchen window rattled in its casing, a dry, high-pitched knock, frame against frame, the specific complaint of a hundred-year-old house being tested, and the snow drove past the glass in thick, horizontal sheets that had nothing to do with the gentle falling of ordinary snow. It was the other kind, the kind that erased the difference between the sky and the ground and made the dark outside the window a single, continuous white. The kind Ethan had driven out into.
I did not let myself finish that thought.
The fire in the living room had burned down to its working embers, orange at the core, the heat of it reaching the kitchen doorway in a thin, constant warmth that my back was turned to. The overhead light had flickered twice in the last hour when gusts hit the north wall, a brief brightening and then the ordinary yellow of it, and I had watched both times and waited to see if it would hold. It had held.
I pressed my hands flatter against the counter.
The ache had been gathering itself for the last several minutes with the particular, purposeful quality of something that knew where it was going, and when it finally arrived, thepeak of it, it arrived completely, a tightening that moved from my lower back around and through my whole midsection with an authority that removed, for several seconds, my ability to think about anything else.
My knuckles went white. I heard my own breath go short and deliberate through my teeth, the thin controlled sound of someone applying a technique to something that was not entirely cooperating with techniques. The counter edge was cold and smooth under my palms. I focused on that. Cold. Smooth. Old pine, the surface of it worn glassy by a hundred years of hands bracing against it for various reasons.
The contraction peaked and began its slow retreat.
I straightened. One hand moved to the underside of my belly, automatic, the same motion I had made ten thousand times since October, the checking motion, the hand finding Hope before I was fully conscious of reaching for her. She was there, the familiar solid weight of her, and I pressed my palm flat and breathed.
Seventeen minutes since the last one. Maybe eighteen.
The road to town was forty minutes in good conditions. Tonight it was nowhere. I knew that the same way I knew the weight of the winter, the same way I knew the sound the roof made when the wind came from the north rather than the west, without deciding to know it, just as simple fact, settled in the bones of the house and the bones of me.
I had just found the thought when the next contraction started.
