The tires screamed as the sedan took the last switchback too fast and drifted sideways before the tread caught and bit back into the ice. Wind shoved at the car with the stubborn strength of a living thing; snow hammered the windshield hard enough to turn the headlamps into a narrow, pulsing tunnel that opened and closed with every gust.
Bill kept both hands locked on the wheel and tried to breathe through the sound that still echoed in his ear—that single torn note that had sliced through James's chatter at the register and left the call gutted. Not static. Not a drop. A scream—sharp, human—and then a cliff of silence.
The driveway wasn't a driveway anymore, just a white swell where the mountain had buried every familiar edge. He took the cut by memory, felt the car slide, let it, feathered the brake, and coasted to a stop with the bumper kissing the first step.
He shut off the engine. The sudden absence of its growl made the storm sound louder. The door stuck, then gave. Cold punched him; snow stung his cheeks and needled his eyes. His breath caught high and burned. He ran for the stairs and almost missed the fourth plank where a glaze had formed. He caught the rail with a jolt that rattled his teeth, fumbled the keys, found the right one by the shape it had worn into his hand, and turned the lock.
Warmth rolled out—familiar and wrong at the same time. Pine and the faint sweetness of last night's candle. Lamps still on. The grandfather clock doing its patient work down the hallway. The cabin looked exactly like safety, and his skin prickled as if it knew better.
"Lenoir!" His voice cracked. He slammed the door with his heel and listened hard, head tilted like a wild thing listening at the mouth of a burrow. The heater sighed. The wind worried the eaves. The house answered like a house.
He moved through it in the line he always took. The living room—the throw was folded the way she liked it, the corner pillow dented by last night's reading. The kitchen—chair tucked, cutting board clean, two slices of bread set to thaw with the small thumb mark still visible through the wrap. The kettle was cold.
He opened the pantry. Jars in orderly rows—cinnamon, tea, candles—where they always lived. The study—lamp burning, ledger open to a list in Lenoir's fine hand: cinnamon, tea, candles—the exact three words repeating without explanation. The bathroom—no steam on the mirror, the citrus trace of her shampoo still caught in the air like a kind hand on the shoulder that didn't quite land.
Dread didn't spike; it settled.
He stepped back into the hall and saw the bedroom door cracked, lamplight falling across the floorboards in a pale trapezoid like a cut of paper. He pushed it wider.
She sat at the edge of the bed, back to him, black hair spilling down an ivory sweater, toes hovering above the braided rug. Her shoulders moved in that small rhythm she had when she was thinking, not afraid.
"Lenoir." He could hear the break in his voice. "I heard you scream. What happened? Are you okay?"
She turned, blue eyes meeting his with confusion, then quick concern. "Scream?" She stood, already crossing to him. "Bill, I didn't scream. I've been here."
"Are you okay?" he repeated. Two truths tried to sit in the same spot and wouldn't. The sound he'd heard had the exact grain of her voice. The woman in front of him looked whole and unafraid.
He caught the bedpost because the wood would hold if he didn't. "Maybe the storm twisted the line," he said, and even as he said it, he heard how thin it was.
"Come here," she murmured, her palms warm as they cradled his cold cheeks. "You're freezing. Sit before you fall."
He sat because his knees had started that small, traitorous tremble that comes when the body stops being useful and starts telling the truth. She wrapped a quilt around his shoulders, slid a towel beneath his feet, and tugged off his boots and socks with quick, practiced efficiency. The steadiness of her movements let the first hard edge of adrenaline give up.
"Tell me what you heard."
He laid it out plain: James talking about the mayor and the salt trucks, the call settling into the comfortable sound of her quiet, the single raw cry that emptied him as if the wind had reached through the phone and pulled—and then the dead line.
He told her it was her voice. He was sure of it.
She listened without flinching. When he finished, she lifted his hand and pressed his palm to her cheek as though to show him the proof that mattered.
"I'm here," she said softly. "You didn't lose me."
Relief stung. The lamp made a warm pool on the coverlet. The clock's next click was a little louder than the one before.
"Let me make some tea."
She went downstairs, and Bill looked at the ceiling, thinking to himself, She's here. It must be my mind playing tricks on me again.
Lenoir returned with two teacups and sat down next to him. She reached for the ginger-lemon he favored when air and fear had scraped his throat raw, tapped the spoon twice against the honey jar the way she always did, and placed the mug in his hands exactly when his fingers had warmed enough to accept it. Steam fogged the window while the storm hissed at the glass.
For a heartbeat, her reflection and the snow outside coexisted in the same pane, then separated again. They carried their mugs to the hearth downstairs. He coaxed the sleepy embers into hunger, stacked splits to draw the draft, and waited while the flame turned steady and sure.
They settled on the rug, the quilt covering both their knees. The silence that followed wasn't empty; it was the kind that arrives when there's finally enough air.
"When I was little," she said after a while, eyes on the rise and fall of the flames, "quiet meant danger. It was always before the shouting. Here… here it doesn't stalk me. Here, quiet is allowed to be quiet."
Bill thought of the orphanage, how the quiet there had stung him, how it reminded him that he was alone and that no one was coming to look after him. It was the worst feeling he'd ever known.
He didn't tell her those stories now. He gave her the one sentence that mattered. "You'll never hear those footsteps again."
A small smile moved at the corner of her mouth, the kind that acknowledges the size of a promise without making a ceremony of it. She leaned her forehead against his.
"I love you, Bill. And you'll never lose me."
Bill smiled, a deep, quiet relief washing over him—the kind he'd only found once, when he found Lenoir.