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Afterward she lay with her head on his chest and her hair spread across his skin.

He could feel her heartbeat slowing against his side. The lamp was still on. The snow was still falling past the window, soft and steady, onto the porch and the woodpile and Pine Street and the whole sleeping valley.

“Still not going anywhere,” she murmured, half-asleep.

“Good,” he said.

He listened to the house.

He knew all its sounds. He had spent eleven years alone with them. The woodstove settling. The old beams creaking with the cold. The wind finding the eaves. For eleven years they had been the sounds of a house with one person in it.

Tonight they sounded different.

Back in September, he had fallen asleep thinking about a classroom light at the end of the east hallway. Tonight she was here, in his house, in his bed, breathing slow and warm against his neck, and he didn’t have to think about anything at all.

He turned off the lamp.

He slept.

Chapter 27

Finally

She woke up to the smell of coffee and a dark window and the sound of someone moving quietly in another room.

For one confused second she didn’t know where she was. The ceiling was wrong. The quilt was wrong, blue and cream and soft with age, and the window was full of stars and snow and the black shapes of mountains instead of the gap in the spruce trees where her lake should be.

Then she remembered.

Soup. A small house at the end of Pine Street. Stay tonight.

She pulled the quilt up to her chin and grinned at the ceiling like an idiot.

The clock on the nightstand said five oh two. He had said five. He had meant five. Of course he had.

She found her sweater on the floor, and then the second sweater, and pulled them both on and padded down the hall in her socks. The living room was lit only by the woodstove, which he had already fed, the fire behind the glass door throwing warm orange light across Roy’s chair and the shelves and the framed photo of a small boy with a fishing rod much too big for him.

He was in the kitchen in his flannel and jeans, standing at the counter with his back to her. He had already been outside. There was snow melting on the shoulders of his jacket where it hung by the door, and through the kitchen window she could see his truck in the drive with the engine running and the headlights on and the windshield already scraped clean.

He had warmed up the truck. For her. At five in the morning.

She was never going to recover from this man. She had accepted that.

He turned around and saw her in the doorway and went still the way he did, and then something in his face went soft.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning.”

He held out a mug. Heavy, handmade, the glaze a deep speckled brown. She took it with both hands. The coffee was exactly how she liked it. She had no idea how he knew how she liked it. Then she remembered that he noticed everything, and had probably known since September.

She looked around the kitchen. The single dish towel. The single chair pulled out at the table. The cabinet door he had left open, with nothing in it but plates.

“Shane,” she said. “Do you only own one mug?”

He picked up his dented steel travel mug from the counter and held it up.

“I own two,” he said. “That one’s taken.”