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But the mail run wasn’t his job. And the Christmas lights weren’t his job. And the look on his face when Norma said his grandfather’s name with warmth instead of suspicion definitely wasn’t his job.

Emily filed it away in a drawer she never wanted to open and moved on.

The weather report said clear skies for the next few days. Thank the Lord for small favors.

Cole took the turn toward the campground and the road, if you could still call it that, disappeared entirely.

Walt and Alice might as well have been living off the grid in Alaska. The campground road was impassable by anything with wheels. Even the snowmobile struggled, Cole navigating by memory and instinct through what used to be a lane and was now a rolling white field dotted with the dark shapes of buried picnic tables and snow-capped fire pits. Pine trees sagged under the weight of the storm, branches bent low enough to brush their shoulders as they passed.

Without the snowmobile, they’d never have made it, which was why Robyn hadn’t made it over. Walt and Alice’s granddaughters—Robyn and Krista—had been plenty worried, and Krista had been monitoring the storm from Brazil, where she and Joe were currently on one of his photojournalist assignments.

The cabin came into view through the trees and Emily’s stomach tightened.

Smoke rose from the chimney in a steady gray thread. That was good. That meant the fire was going, that Walt had kept it fed, that they were warm.

Everything else was less good.

The wind had blown straight across the lake and hammered the front of the house with everything it had. Drifts six, seven, maybe eight feet high were packed against the front wall, swallowing the porch entirely. The front door was buried. The ground-floor windows were half-covered. The whole front of the cabin looked like it had been sealed shut by the storm.

“Oh no,” Emily said quietly.

Cole cut the engine. He was already off the snowmobile, already assessing.

She watched the way his eyes moved across the building, quick and systematic. The roofline first, then the windows, then the foundation, reading the structure the way other people read a menu. It took him maybe five seconds.

“Stay here,” he said.

“I’m not staying⁠—”

“Emily. Stay here.”

Something in his voice made her stop. This was Cole at work. The same Cole who ran into burning buildings, and right now, he was assessing a dangerous situation, and he didn’t need her giving him trouble.

She stayed.

Cole moved along the side of the cabin, wading through snow that came up to his waist.

A moment later, the upstairs curtain shifted. Walt appeared in the second-floor window, baseball hat on, squinting against the glare. He raised a hand. Emily could see his mouth moving, and then the window cracked open.

“Emily!” His voice carried across the snow, thin in the cold air. “Front door’s completely buried.”

“Yeah, I see that. Don’t worry, we’ll get you out,” she called back. “Cole Alders is with me. He’s coming around the back.”

Walt looked down toward where Cole was wading through the drifts and nodded. “Back deck’s partially clear. But the door’s iced shut. There’s a window above the overhang. I’ll go unlock it.”

“He’ll find it,” Emily said with more confidence in Cole Alders than she was entirely comfortable expressing out loud.

Walt disappeared from the window.

Emily stood alone in the silence. The lake stretched out behind her, vast and white and still. The only sounds were the wind and her own breathing and the creak of the pine trees settling under their weight.

A minute passed. Then another.

And another.

Emily wouldn’t totally put it past Cole to leave her out there to freeze to death.

She decided it wouldn’t hurt to follow his tracks and take a peek. After all, for all she knew, he could’ve slipped and was lying in the snow needing a rescue.