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.
"You were gone four days."
"I know." He kissed her again.
His coat ended up somewhere in the hallway. She was laughing by the time they hit the stairs - some breathless, giddy thing she couldn't control - and she stumbled on the top step and he caught her, spun her around, pressed his mouth to the side of her throat. The laughter stopped. He walked her backward through the bedroom door and she reached behind herself in the dark and found the light switch and clicked it on, and he looked at her in the full light of the room, and she forgot what she'd been about to say.
Outside, the storm pressed on against the windows.
Inside, everything was very warm.
She couldn't have said what time it was when they finally lay still.
Late. Very late. The storm had quieted - or she could no longer hear it over the blood rushing in her ears - and the room was warm from the heat vent and from the two of them, and Blake was stretched beside her with his chest rising and falling slowly, one arm thrown over his eyes.
Jade stared at the ceiling.
The happiness lasted exactly thirty seconds. It always lasted about thirty seconds. Then the guilt came in - patient, familiar, specific - and settled into her chest like a stone dropped in still water, and started its inventory.
Gerald is in a motel right now. He'd be horrified. Margaret had called her sweetheart when she left the voicemail. She'd said it without thinking, the way she always said it, easy and warm. Sweetheart. Blake's flight wasn't supposed to land until tomorrow evening. Except it wasn't delayed at all. He'd caught an earlier connection. He'd flown through a snowstorm to get home a night early, and she had opened the door, and they had-
She sat up.
Blake's arm came around her waist immediately, locking her in place. He moved fast for a man who had just spent a night like that. She had never figured out how he did it.
"Where are you going?"
"It's late. I should-"
"Jade." Not sharp. Just specific - the particular voice he used when he was done waiting for her to say what she was already thinking. "Tell me."
She pressed her lips together and said nothing.
He let a breath out through his nose. "Is it the usual thing?"
"Blake-"
"Just say it. Whatever it is, say it."
She looked down at her hands in her lap. "You said it earlier. Mom and Dad." The words felt like they cost something to repeat. "Just - casually. Like it's nothing."
"It is nothing."
"It's not nothing. They're out there right now, in some motel outside Worcester, and they think I'm here alone, and they think you're in Dallas, and we are-" She stopped. Made herself finish it. "We are here."
