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Shane had not brought wildflowers.

He had fixed a window and checked her pipes and made sure her propane backup was running and then sat at her kitchen table all day while the storm moved through and told her things he’d never told anyone, and she had listened, really listened, in the way she had of receiving things without fixing them, without making them into something for her to solve, and he had felt, for the first time in longer than he wanted to count, like a person rather than a function.

It matters that you wanted it, she’d said. Not because you should have gone. Just because it was yours.

He lay in her bed in the December morning and felt that sentence move through him again, the same way it had moved through him at the kitchen table, like something being set down after a long time carrying.

He got up carefully.

* * *

He found his clothes, the flannel, his jeans, his boots, and got dressed in the quiet way of someone who has learned to move without waking anyone, and went to the kitchen.

The cottage was cold in the way it was cold in the mornings before the propane heat had fully caught up with the night, not uncomfortable, just present, the chill of a December morning in an old house that held warmth imperfectly. He checked the propane, running fine, and found the coffee on the counter. The good kind, the kind she’d clearly chosen deliberately, because she was a person who made choices about coffee the same way she made choices about everything, with attention.

He made coffee on the gas burner.

He stood at the kitchen window with it and looked at Clearwater Lake through the gap in the spruce trees, different angle from the bedroom, lower, through the snow-weighted branches, and drank his coffee in the quiet of her cottage at six in the morning and thought about nothing in particular, which was unusual for him and felt, this morning, exactly right.

He heard her before he saw her.

The sound of her moving (he knew it now, the unhurried quality of it) and then she appeared in the kitchen doorway in what was clearly a sweater she’d pulled on in a hurry over pajama pants, her dark hair loose and slightly chaotic, her face doing the thing faces did in the morning before they’d decided what expression to wear.

She stopped when she saw him.

He looked at her.

“You made coffee,” she said.

“Found it,” he said.

She looked at the mug in his hand. She looked at him. A slow smile found its way onto her face... the warm one, the one that arrived before she’d decided to let it, the one he’d been watching for since August.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said.

She crossed the kitchen and opened the cabinet and got a mug and poured her own coffee and came to stand beside him at the window and they looked at the lake together through the gap in the spruce trees, and the December morning did its thing outside, the light coming slowly over the mountains, and neither of them said anything for a while.

It was the most comfortable silence he could remember being in.

Her shoulder was almost touching his.

He shifted slightly so it was.

She leaned into it, just barely, the smallest amount, not moving toward him exactly, just allowing the contact, the warmth of someone who had decided to stop managing distance.

He drank his coffee.

She drank hers.

Outside, Clearwater Lake went from silver to gold.

* * *

Her walk was buried under a foot and a half of snow, and so was her car.

He found the shovel on the porch and went out in his flannel, because it would only take a minute, and he had cleared the first stretch of the path when the door opened behind him. She came down the steps in her boots, her coat thrown over the pajama pants, holding the snow brush from her car.