THE GLASS SEASON

THE GLASS SEASON A Winter Romance A Novel   Chapter One: Off-Season — ❖ — Ethan Cole arrived in Merrow on the first Tuesday of November, when the leaves had already given up and the sky sat low and gray over the Atlantic like a held breath. He had rented the Salton house sight unseen from a website that promised "charming beach cottage, winter rates, total solitude." The cottage was exactly that—salt-bleached shingles, a kitchen with a single coil stove, a bedroom whose window faced an ocean the color of cold steel. It was the kind of quiet that made a man check his pulse. He had come to finish a novel. That was the official story. His agent, his mother, the few friends who still called, all believed he needed to "get away from the noise." The noise, as it happened, was not the city. The noise was his own head, eleven months of blank pages, a broken engagement, and the particular humiliation of being a man who wrote about love for a living while being unable to sustain the real thing. Claire had ended it in April. She had been kind about it, which was worse. "You're not present, Ethan. You're always two chapters ahead of yourself, and I can't live in the margins anymore." He had tried to argue, but she had already put her rings in his palm like change for a bus he'd never take. So here he was. November. Merrow. A town whose population sign read 1,240 in summer and something considerably smaller when the tourists left. He had packed two boxes of books, a laptop with a blinking cursor, and the bones of a story he had been unable to flesh out since before Claire. The first night, he walked the beach at dusk. The wind came off the water with a knife-sharp edge, smelling of salt and dead kelp and something ancient. Snow would come in a week or two. He dug his hands into his pockets and thought about nothing, which was a terrible feeling for a writer—to have a mind empty of everything except weather. Then he saw the light. It was on Harbor Street, a narrow road of shuttered storefronts and fishermen's supply shops. The windows were dark everywhere except one. A warm square of amber, glowing steady against the sodium lamps of the town. It looked like the last ember in a dying fire, and Ethan found himself walking toward it without deciding to. The sign above the door was small, hand-lettered: MARA HOLT — GLASS He stood across the street for a long time, watching the light. There was movement inside—a shadow passing between the window and whatever source of heat made the glass bloom like that. A figure, fine-boned but solid, bending over something. He couldn't make out a face. But the silhouette stirred something in him, a recognition he couldn't name. He went home, made tea he didn't drink, and sat at the laptop until 2 a.m. The cursor blinked. He wrote a sentence about light. Just one. Then he went to bed.