Page 137

“There,” he said. “Now it’s where it goes.”

* * *

She fell asleep before midnight, on the couch in front of the fire, with her head in his lap and her feet tucked up under the old blanket she’d kept in the back seat of her car for two years.

He sat there with the firelight moving on the ceiling and his hand resting in her hair, and he didn’t move for a long time.

At some point the clock on her kitchen wall moved past twelve.

Christmas.

He looked at her face in the firelight. Her lashes on her cheek. The paint that was, even now, on the side of her left hand, cobalt blue, the same place it had been the first morning she turned around at The Brook and walked straight into him.

The name rose up in him again. The one that had slipped out once at the hardware store counter, in front of Charlie and Doug. The one Roy had had for his grandmother. The one that was just his.

He held it one more night.

Tomorrow, he thought.

Outside, far off across the dark, the lake sang once more, low and long, and went quiet.

Chapter 30

Chosen

She woke up in her own bed and had no idea how she’d gotten there.

The last thing she remembered was the fire, and his hand in her hair, and the warm heavy pull of sleep coming up over her while he sat very still so he wouldn’t wake her. And now she was in her bed under her own quilt, in her own room, with the covers tucked around her shoulders the careful way you tuck in someone you don’t want to disturb.

He had carried her.

She lay there and let that sink all the way in. He had lifted her off the couch and carried her down the hall and put her to bed and tucked her in, and she had slept through the whole thing, and he had not said a word about it and probably never would.

The room was gray and blue and very quiet.

He was awake beside her. She could tell without looking. He was lying on his back with one arm behind his head, and he was looking out her window.

Her window faced east. It was the reason she had picked this room back in August, the first afternoon, standing in the empty cottage with her car keys still in her hand. The lake. You could see the lake from bed.

She turned her head on the pillow and looked where he was looking.

Clearwater Lake lay white and frozen all the way across, and the sky over the mountains was just beginning to change, the dark going thin and pale at the very edge. And low over the ice, thin as breath, a fog was hanging. Ice fog. It lay along the surface in long soft drifts, barely moving, silver in the gray light.

She watched it.

And for one second, just one, the fog along the north shore gathered itself into a shape. Long and low. A roofline. The long, hunkered roofline of a house that looked like it had always been there, sitting just above the ice where the old spruce came down to the water.

Then the first light came over the mountains and touched it, and it was only fog again, thinning, lifting, gone.

She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure she’d seen it. She was almost sure she had.

She turned back to him.

He was already looking at her.

“Morning,” he said. His voice was low and rough with sleep.

“Morning.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “You carried me to bed.”