The voicemail played through her phone speaker for the second time, and Jade still hadn't moved.
Hi sweetheart, it's Mom. The roads into the city are backed up for miles - this storm is worse than they said. We found a motel just outside Worcester and we'll push through first thing in the morning. Blake's flight is showing delays too, honey. He won't make it back until tomorrow evening at the earliest. You'll be on your own tonight. There's soup in the freezer and I left twenty dollars in the junk drawer if you want to order anything. Call if you need us. Love you.
She typed back: I'm fine. Drive safe tomorrow. Then she set the phone on the coffee table and went back to her book.
The Thorne house did its particular nighttime thing - settling in the cold, the wind working at the old windows in the upstairs hallway, the furnace clicking on and off with a sound she'd spent five winters learning to ignore. The fire in the living room had burned down to embers. Outside, Boston was buried in twelve inches of new snow and climbing.
She was fine. She was absolutely, entirely fine.
She was also not reading the book. She'd read the same paragraph four times and she could not have told anyone what it said.
The front door opened.
Jade was on her feet before her brain had time to register the decision. She grabbed the fireplace poker from the brass stand because she was alone in an empty house in the middle of a blizzard and the front door had just opened and she was holding the poker at shoulder height and-
Blake.
He was standing in the entryway with snow on the shoulders of his dark coat and his hair flattened by the wind and wet at the ends, his duffel bag dropped at his feet, one hand still resting on the door handle. He looked at her. He looked at the fireplace poker raised in her right fist. He looked back at her face.
The corner of his mouth lifted.
"Were you going to hit me with that?"
Her heart was still slamming. "You were supposed to be here tomorrow."
"I caught an earlier connection out of Dallas." He let the door fall shut behind him and stepped inside. Snow scattered off his coat onto the entryway tile. He didn't look around the room. He just looked at her, the way he always looked at her when he'd been away and come back - steady and intent, like he was taking inventory. "Put that down, Jade."
She set the poker back in its stand.
She didn't know which of them moved first. Both, probably. His hands were cold when they found her face - cold from the storm, cold all the way through his sleeves - and she didn't care, because he kissed her the way he kissed her when he'd been gone too long, which was thorough and entirely unhurried, and she kissed him back with both hands fisted in the lapels of his coat and her heart doing something helpless in her chest.
"I missed you," he said against her mouth.