“Need a hand?” came the voice I’d been trying not to catalog all night.
I looked up. Drew. Hair damp from snow, flannel sleeves shoved to his elbows, a smear of grease or soot on his forearm because of course he’d been fixing something that required getting dirty. He held out a stack of quilts and that lopsided half-smile he wore when he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to smile at me.
“I’ve got it,” I said, meaning the quilts, not my life.
“Okay,” he said, and set them on the table anyway, close enough that the edge of one brushed my wrist. “There’s soup, if you want some.” He gestured to the far corner where Mrs. Santos had somehow conjured two slow cookers and enough bread to carb-load a football team.
“I’m good,” I lied. My stomach had been a clenched fist since The Rusty Stag.
He hesitated. “You staying here tonight?”
“I think that’s the definition of ‘blizzard shelter,’ yes.” I looked past him at the doors, frosted white from the outside. “Roads are closed. Your town is adorable and vindictive.”
He smiled at that, quick and faint. “We prefer unyielding.”
“For branding,” I said.
“For truth,” he said.
We worked. That was how we didn’t talk. He handed out hot packs. I tied hats under small chins. He lifted, carried, fixed. I soothed, fetched, folded. Lydia moved through us like a conductor—cocoa here, batteries there, humor everywhere. Riley announced we were calling the generator Bruce because it sounded like a cranky uncle who nonetheless shows up with a snow shovel and a casserole.
The storm pressed its shoulder into the building and kept pushing.
Around ten, the gym softened. Conversations thinned to murmurs, then to the rustle of blankets and the occasional whistle-snores of someone who’d earned the right to be oblivious. The lanterns turned everything sepia, a postcard of survival. Lydia declared a truce with fatigue and curled up on a cot in her boots, arm flung over her eyes, the clipboard tucked under her shoulder like a teddy bear. Riley yawned loud enough to qualify as a declaration of war and then immediately fell asleep sitting upright against a column, arms crossed, chin tucked, a cocoa cup still in her hand like a prop.
Drew materialized beside me again, which was either fate or the fact that the supply room door was behind me. He nodded toward it.
“Out of the frenzy back there,” he said. “If you need five minutes.”
“Five minutes sounds illegal,” I said, because humor keeps the ice from forming on the softest parts.
“Then we’ll break the law,” he said quietly.
He pushed the door open and I followed him into the narrow hallway. It smelled like paper, dust, and the kind of institutional soap that never quite wins. A string of old winter concert posters lined the wall—smiling kids in Santa hats frozen in time. Fluorescent lights hummed low overhead. The HVAC clicked and sighed.
We slipped into the supply room—shelves of paper towels, stacks of bottled water, boxes labeled GLOVES, HATS, HOLIDAY LIGHTS (BAD). Someone had dragged an old space heater in there. It pinged and ticked, bravely sending out the kind of heat that might not warm you but tries.
“Thrilling venue,” I said.
“We get all the best dates,” he answered.
For a second, neither of us spoke. I folded my arms like I could corral the mess inside me into something manageable. He leaned against a shelf, head tipped back, eyes closed as if he were checking a prayer for typos before sending it.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said, eyes still closed. “With her.”
“I know,” I said automatically, because I hated clichés and I refused to use one. “I saw you not do anything. That wasn’t the problem.”
He looked at me then, and in the low light he looked older, softer, something like tired in the bones.
“I know my past makes good lies,” he said. “It’s on me that you can believe them.”
“That’s very noble,” I said. “I’m too grumpy for noble. I was jealous. Then I was humiliated at being jealous. Then I was angry at being humiliated. It’s a rich tapestry.”
He grumbled a breath that wanted to be a laugh but wasn’t. “I earned some of that.”
I stared at the shelf label that read EXTENSION CORDS and tried to arrange my mouth around the thing I didn’t want to say, because once you say it, you can’t unsay it, and a thousand small protections get ripped up and thrown away like wrapping paper.
“You… hurt me,” I heard myself say. It surprised me. I thought I’d swallowed it. “And not because of what happened this morning. Because what happened this morning let me pretend what I felt last night wasn’t real. Which is… easier. In the short term.”
