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“I’m going,” he said.
He wasn’t going.
“Shane.”
He pulled back, slowly, his forehead leaving hers, his hand leaving her jaw, and she felt the cold air arrive in the space where he’d been and stood in it for a moment. He looked at her one more time, in the December dark, in the snow, with the expression she’d been waiting four months to see fully.
He went.
She watched him walk back down Main Street, the unhurried walk she knew, his hands in his pockets, the snow coming down around him, his footsteps the only sound, until he turned the corner and was gone.
She stood on the sidewalk in the snow for a long moment.
She put her fingers to her jaw where his hand had been. The cold where something warm had been.
She looked up at the snow-dark sky.
She thought about August. About a road that the GPS couldn’t find. About a valley opening like cupped hands and a lake going silver in the afternoon light and something in her saying oh before she’d decided to feel anything.
Oh, she thought, standing in the snow in front of Founders Square at nine fifteen on a Tuesday in December.
Oh oh oh.
She walked home on Lakeview Lane with the snow coming down soft and steady and the spruce trees weighted with it and the gap where the lake showed through, white at the edges, the water dark and still in the middle, the mountains invisible behind the clouds that were still delivering their snow, and she sat on her porch in her coat for forty-five minutes because she was not ready to be inside yet.
The snow settled on the porch railing.
She looked at the lake.
She took out her phone.
something happened she texted Lauren.
Twenty seconds.
CALL ME RIGHT NOW
She looked at the snow on the railing and the dark lake and the white mountains she couldn’t see and felt, in her chest, something so full it barely fit.
She called.
Chapter 19
What Did We Just Do
He was at the lake by five.
The snow was still on everything. It had kept coming through the night, another inch or two on top of what had fallen during the meeting, and the north shore of Clearwater Lake was white and silent in the early dark, the spruce trees holding the weight of it. He brushed the granite shelf clean with his sleeve and sat down and put his line in the water and looked at the lake and thought:
What did I just do.
Not a question exactly. More like a thing he was holding up to the light, turning it to see all its sides. The lake was dark and still in the December morning, the snow at its edges making the water look like an opening in the white world, and he sat in the cold silence of five in the morning in winter and thought about kissing Allison Hayes in the snow in front of Founders Square.
He had done that.
He had done that last night.
He sat with it.
