Megan didn’t answer immediately. She lay there in the dark with his words settling around her and felt the loosening go further than she’d intended to let it.
She thought about what she was about to say. She was aware it was a gift, and that gifts given from a position like hers were never simple. She gave them rarely and she did not take them back once given.
“I trust you,” she said quietly. “In case you want to know why.” She felt him go still. “You came back into the river. You share your food even when there isn’t enough for one person. You look at me like I’m a person, not a problem to be solved or a possession to be managed.” She stopped, then made herself finish it. “And when you talk about your friend, I hear grief. Love. I think a man who can love someone that way can’t be entirely what you’ve been telling me you are.”
She felt him absorb it. The silence that followed differed from the silences before it: fuller somehow, more careful. Hedidn’t rush to answer. He sat with what she’d said, and the fact of him sitting with it, not deflecting it or folding it immediately into something else, was itself a kind of answer.
When he finally spoke, his voice was lower than before.
“I want you,” he said. “I should say that alongside the rest of it. Not because it changes anything or because I would act on it. But I’ve wanted you since before I had any right to, and you’ve just been more honest with me than almost anyone has been, and you deserve the same in return.” A pause. “So. Not entirely noble.”
Megan was quiet for a moment.
“Not so noble,” she said. “That’s honest, at least. Better than pretty lies.”
And she didn’t move away.
She felt it register in him, that small fact. The particular quality of stillness that settled over him in response, as though he were holding something he didn’t want to disturb.
She didn’t examine what she felt herself. She noted it and set it to one side, filed under things that would need attending to when she had the room for them. When she wasn’t frozen and hungry and being hunted across the mountains of Wales.
“Stop telling me all the reasons I shouldn’t trust you,” she said. “I already know them.”
“Then why?—”
“I told you why.” Her fingers found his in the dark, threading through them. “That’s the reason. You don’t need a better one.”
He turned his hand over. Held hers.
They fell silent. The storm continued its assault. And in the darkness, Megan lay pressed against this impossible, careful, grief-carrying man and felt the last of the grip she’d held for fourteen years loosen another degree, entirely against her will, and didn’t try to stop it.
The storm lasted two days.
Two days of howling wind and driving snow, of hunger thatgnawed like a living thing, of cold so intense that Oliver lost feeling in his fingers and toes. He and Webb took turns making sure the horses had water, packing snow into the rock crevices and letting it melt. The animals were too cold to care much about food. So were the rest of them.
But they survived.
On the morning of the third day, Megan woke to silence.
The wind had stopped. The snow had ceased. Beyond the cave entrance, the world was white and gleaming and so still it looked like something in a dream.
Oliver was already awake. He was standing at the cave entrance looking out at the transformed landscape, and she watched him shift from a man who had been waiting through the night into a man with a plan. She’d noticed it before, that transition. Something in his posture, in the way his attention organized itself.
She found it, against everything she’d intended, reassuring.
“It’s over,” she said.
He turned. “We need to move today. Before we’re too weak to travel.”
She stood, her muscles screaming in protest, and went to check on Webb.
“Tell me we’re close,” Webb said, without opening his eyes.
“One day’s ride,” Oliver said. “Maybe two in this snow.”
“Wonderful,” Webb said. “Absolutely wonderful.”
Megan almost smiled.
