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But then it starts to pick up, and I think about the call with my mom.

The storm.

Snowflakes fall at an alarming rate as freezing rain starts to beat against the roof of the car. Since we’re not moving, Henry hasn’t hit the windshield wipers yet, allowing the flakes to smear the red reflection of the brake lights in front of us.

We both sigh almost in unison, and I would make a joke but neither of us is in a place for that.

Shit.

* * *

Another hour of silence, and we’ve hardly inched along at all. The snow sticks to the road, collecting on the hood of the barely moving car. None of this is good.

Henry takes another deep breath and lets out a haggard sigh. “If we’d gotten an earlier start, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

It catches me off guard. I’d gotten used to the quiet hum of the car.

He looks at me pointedly, as if this is my fault, his brows furrowed.

“Who’s the one who slept in?” I counter, because the truth of why we left late is so blatantly clear to me.

“Who’s the one who insisted we go to the stupid reunion and get so intoxicated we slept through an alarm? I haven’t missed an alarm since…” He trails off. The memory of one crucial alarm that never sounded hangs heavy between us. “I usually wake up three minutes before it goes off. My internal clock was impeccable before you came along.”

I stare at him for a moment. He looks nervously at me, then quickly glances back to the road, as if suddenly we’ll be moving again at a normal speed, getting the fuck out of here.

“I didn’t insist you go last night,” I say slowly, softly. “I didn’t even invite you. I went. With Frankie. I just mentioned latkes and you were drawn to them. Look, my family latke recipe is perfect. I get it. I can’t blame you for thinking the same.” I pause, quietly fuming that he thinks this is all somehow my fault. “But that’s on you. Not on me. Or my latkes.”

“Norah, we—” he starts, but I cut him off, that one word after my name blistering through me.

“There is no we in this scenario. There was never a we in any past, present, or future scenario.” I don’t know why I say future, but I’m carried away by the heat of my fury at this man.

He stares straight ahead. “I didn’t have to stay the extra night.”

“You were working,” I point out, repeating what Mom and Kristine told me.

“Did it look like I was working when you barged into my house, covered in flour, looking so goddamn—” He stops himself, even though I’m desperate to hear him finish that sentence. Messy? Disgusting? Anything to further fuel this anger I’m feeling toward him right now. But he refocuses. “I could have gone with them yesterday, but I was instructed to wait. For you. Because Sara was worried about you driving since you don’t have a car in New York.”

My sister’s goodbye rings in my ears. No one trusts you to drive to Great Blue Lodge yourself. A validation of his statement that I didn’t want to hear, so I deflect.

“What, and you do?”

“Of course I do.”

Somehow this admission doesn’t surprise me, but it does make me angrier. True, I haven’t had a car in years—because who has a car in the city? But I still have my license. I rent cars when I need to. I don’t like the implication of any of this, that I am beholden to Henry Cole for some gentlemanly duty I didn’t even realize was happening.

So I decide not to address any of that.

“I know how to drive. I definitely drove you to school plenty of times before—” I catch myself. Before everything went to shit. Before it became unbearable to be in a confined space with you. Before you hurt me. “I can prove it,” I say instead. I unbuckle my seat belt and gesture for us to switch seats.

Henry looks so pained right now that it’s almost comical. He clearly doesn’t have the energy to fight me on this. The traffic is at a standstill anyway, so he throws the car into park and opens the driver’s-side door. I follow his lead, running around the front of the car to the driver’s seat.

I slam the door closed and pat down the snowflakes that fell into my mess of curls. In the seconds it takes to switch seats, we’re somehow both soaked. I adjust the seat all the way up, silently marveling at how a human could possibly take up so much more space in this car than I do, and adjust the mirrors. I’m shivering so much I can’t tell if he is too, or if it’s all just my own shaking. He reaches a long arm into the backseat and offers me a blanket, but I tell him I’m fine. The idea of him wrapping me in a blanket, of him helping me in any way at this point, makes me want to slam his mother’s poor old CR-V into the Benz in front of us.

As I’m picturing this, the Benz eases off its brakes and starts to move. I gasp, as if the sheer magic of me now being in control of this car has forced the universe to get us out of this mess. As we start to move, I see what’s happening. Workers in reflective vests are gesturing. The road is closed, and we’re being put on a detour.

“This is the only way to get to Great Blue Lodge,” Henry states flatly as we exit the interstate. He pulls out his phone and starts trying to map another option.

I follow the hundreds of other cars, all along the same unhelpful route, for a while as Henry frantically looks for another way. In the time that he’s been looking down at his phone, the snow has really picked up. I’d forgotten how New York snow and Illinois snow are two entirely different beasts, and I definitely haven’t driven in a storm like this since I left the Midwest. It’s getting hard for me to see anything but taillights, but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of having been right about me.