Read Chapter 10: The Aftermath

The wind screamed against the windows like something alive, and the inn shuddered around them as if it might shake apart at the seams. Maren stood at the kitchen counter with her back to the archway that led to the dining room, gripping the edge of the marble until her knuckles went white, listening to the storm tear through the valley. She hadn't moved in nearly ten minutes. The dying fire in the hearth crackled behind her, and somewhere overhead a shutter banged loose against its hinges.

Julian was in the armchair by the window, his book open on his lap, though she could tell he wasn't reading. His eyes kept drifting to the snow piling against the glass, a white wall building higher and higher until the world outside was just a smear of nothing. The radio had gone silent an hour ago, and the landline had been dead since noon. They were alone in a way that felt archaeological, like two relics sealed in amber, waiting to be discovered when the thaw came.

The silence between them was thick enough to choke on.

She heard him shift in the chair, the creak of old springs, and then the soft thud of his book closing. She tensed. He cleared his throat and she braced herself for whatever cutting remark he'd prepared, another jab to pick at the wound he'd opened at dinner.

"I'm hungry," he said instead.

Maren blinked. She turned slowly, arms crossed over her chest, and found him standing in the archway with his hands shoved into his pockets. His dark hair was mussed, falling across his forehead, and there was something almost sheepish in his expression. Almost apologetic. He looked smaller than he had an hour ago, stripped of his condescension.

"There's a pantry full of food and you're a grown man," she said flatly. "Help yourself."

"I don't cook."

"Then learn."

"I know how to cook," he said, and a frustrated breath escaped him. "That's not—I mean, I don't cook *well*. I burn toast. I once set a pot of water on fire."

"You can't set water on fire."

"Tell that to my insurance company."

The absurdity of it cracked something in her chest, a hairline fracture in the hard shell of her anger. She almost laughed. She bit the inside of her cheek and looked away instead, at the snow piling on the windowsill, the drifts reaching up like slow, white tide.

"You can help," she said, and she wasn't sure why she said it. Maybe because the wind was howling and the inn was dark and the silence was worse than his company. "If you can chop vegetables without losing a finger."

He followed her into the kitchen, and for a while there was nothing but the clatter of pans and the rhythmic thunk of his knife against the cutting board. She'd given him onions and carrots and celery for a stew, a simple enough task, but she watched him out of the corner of her eye as she browned the beef. His knife work was careful, precise, each cut deliberate. Not a chef's hands, but a writer's. Someone who paid attention to small things.

He caught her watching and raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Nothing." She turned back to the stove, stirring the meat until it sizzled and browned. "You just seem like you've done that before."

"I've watched a lot of cooking shows at three in the morning when I couldn't sleep." He scraped the vegetables into a bowl and set it beside her. "There's something meditative about watching other people make things while you're falling apart."

Maren went still. The wooden spoon paused mid-stir, and she tasted the weight of his words, the casual confession buried underneath. She didn't turn around, but her voice softened.

"Falling apart?"

Silence stretched between them, broken only by the wind's howl and the pop of the fire, and she thought she'd pushed too hard, that he'd retreat back behind his walls. But then he came to stand beside her at the stove, his shoulder almost touching hers.

"I've been working on the same book for three years," he said, his voice low, like he was confessing to a crime. "My publisher advanced me a quarter of a million dollars on the strength of my first novel. And I've written—" He laughed, a hollow, self-deprecating sound. "I've written a thousand pages of nothing. Justifications, false starts, sentences I've rewritten until they don't mean anything anymore. I've become an expert at sounding like I'm writing without actually writing."

Maren added the vegetables to the pot, the hiss of steam filling the kitchen. She didn't look at him, but she felt his gaze on her, waiting for her reaction.

"Why did you come here?" she asked. "To the inn?"

"Your grandmother." He picked up a wooden spoon and stirred the pot, a quiet gesture of partnership. "She wrote to me. Found my first novel in a library in Burlington, tracked me down through my publisher. She had a story she wanted told, and she offered me a place to stay. Free. Said it would be good for me."

"Arthur's story."

Julian paused. His hand stilled on the spoon, and she caught the flicker of something in his eyes, a guardedness that slid back into place like a window shuttering.

"Yes," he said carefully. "Something like that."

"He wrote to her, didn't he? Arthur. The letters I found—she never responded." Maren's voice trailed off. She thought of her grandmother hunched over the kitchen table, writing letters she never mailed, hiding them away in a shoe box where her daughter wouldn't find them. Margaret had resented Nora for it, for choosing safety over love, for teaching her daughter that fear was a virtue. "She was afraid."

"Your grandmother was a lot of things," Julian said softly. "Afraid was one of them."

His words landed somewhere deep in her chest, and she thought about the lie she'd told over dinner, the elaborate fiction of a successful career she'd built from nothing. She'd let him see through it, watched him dismantle her with questions she couldn't answer, and the humiliation still burned sour in her throat.

"I lied," she said abruptly. The words fell out of her like stones. "I wasn't a successful executive chef. I wasn't even a chef."

Julian didn't respond, didn't rush to fill the silence, and that made it easier to keep going.

"I was a line cook. A really good line cook, actually. I worked my way up from prep to sous at a restaurant in Brooklyn, and I was good at it. I was going to be the first female executive chef they'd ever had." She laughed, but it came out broken. "And then I found out my boyfriend, the man I was going to move in with, the man I thought I loved—he was screwing the owner. He gave her all my recipes, my menu ideas, everything. Told her I was struggling, that I was a liability, that if she promoted me the whole kitchen would walk. And she believed him because why wouldn't she? He was charming and handsome and I was—I was just a girl with a knife and a dream."

Her hands were shaking. She set down the spoon and gripped the counter, steadying herself.

"I walked into a walk-in freezer and screamed until I lost my voice. Then I went back out, handed in my resignation, and packed a bag." She gestured vaguely toward the ceiling, toward everything. "Three days later, I got the letter about my grandmother passing, and this place she'd left me. I told myself I was coming here to start over. But I think I was just running. The same way she did."

The wind howled, a long, mournful note, and snow avalanched off the roof with a muffled thud. Julian didn't move. His hands were still on the spoon, and she watched his jaw tighten, saw something flicker in his eyes that she couldn't name.

"Frauds," he said finally, his voice rough. "We're a couple of frauds, hiding out in the same house."

"At least the house is nice," she managed.

"It's a good house to be a fraud in."

A laugh escaped her, surprised out of her, small but real. Julian's mouth quirked, a ghost of a smile that softened the sharp edges of his face. He stirred the pot, and the kitchen filled with the smell of beef and herbs, something warm and grounding.

"Smells good," she said.

"That's because you did the hard part. I chopped a carrot."

"Barely."

He handed her the spoon back, and their fingers brushed, a fleeting sensation of warmth in the cold room. Neither of them pulled away immediately. They stood there, shoulder to shoulder, watching the stew bubble, the snow piling against the windows like a rising tide, burying them deeper in their temporary sanctuary.

Outside, the wind screamed, and the storm showed no signs of letting up. But inside, the fire crackled, and the stew simmered, and for the first time since the blizzard had begun, the silence between them felt bearable.