The storm didn't let up for two more days. Nothing unusual. Just wind, white silence, and the strange, suspended quiet of a cabin cut off from everything.
I should have felt safer. Mostly, I just felt aware. Of every sound the cabin made. Of him.
I noticed it the first morning, before I'd even fully woken. I came into the kitchen and found the wood basket already full, stacked neat and even, the logs arranged largest to smallest like someone had taken actual care with it, though I hadn't heard him go out to the shed. I hadn't heard anything at all.
"You didn't have to do that."
"It was getting low." He didn't look up from the coffee he was pouring, his movements unhurried, like he'd made himself at home in my kitchen without ever asking permission and somehow that didn't bother me the
