"You are. You're deflecting hard." I hear the static shift as Finn adjusts the handset, and when he speaks again, his voice has dropped to the register he saves for the truth. "She's coming back, Nash."
"She said she was coming back," I correct him, wiping a spot of imaginary grease from the workbench. "She'll get off that plane. I know that. I'm not worried about the plane."
"Then what are you worried about?"
"Six months from now," I say, the dark thought that's been circling for the last hour finally finding voice. "A year from now. When the honeymoon wears off and the winters get longer and Fairbanks feels like a real city again. That's when I lose her."
Finn sighs, and even at ten miles I can hear him shake his head. "You really have the Hollister Curse bad, don't you?"
The Hollister Curse. It's the family joke that isn't a joke. When the Hollister men fall, we fall hard, and usually for women we can't keep, or worse, women we lose.
I look at the torque wrench, thinking about Dad. He didn't lose Mom to a plane ticket. He lost her to a disease he couldn't fight. He was gone for months after, walking off his grief, and when he came back, the house was quieter in every room she used to be in. He's still there. He's just slower now.
"I'm not Dad," I say. "And Aris isn't dying."
"No," Finn says gently. "But you're terrified she's going to disappear anyway. That the happy ending isn't something we get to keep."
I don't answer.
"Nash." Finn's voice sharpens. "Stop cleaning clean tools. I know you're doing it. Get on your machine, get to the harbor, and go stand on the dock like a normal lovesick idiot before you strip a thread on something you actually need."
"I hate you."
"I know. It's my charm." I can hear him grin—that widening silence that always means a trap is coming. "Also, tell me you haven't shaved twice today."
I touch my jaw instinctively. It's smooth. I shaved this morning. And then again twenty minutes ago because I found a spot I missed.
"Shut up, Finn."
"Oh no. Oh no. You did. I called it. Kane owes me twenty bucks." Finn's laugh cracks through the radio. "Mags is going to lose her mind when I tell her."
"If you tell Mags anything, I will loosen the lug nuts on your snow machine."
"Empty threats from a man in love. Crystal Creek out."
The radio clicks dark.
I stand in the shed for another ten seconds, staring at the generator. It's humming perfectly. Voltage is steady. Spark plugs clean. Filters new.
I've fixed the machine. I've controlled the variables I can control.
Now I just have to see if the one variable I can't control—the woman with the stubborn streak and the PhD—is actually going to show up.
I take a deep breath, inhaling diesel and pine, and head for the snowmobile.
The ride to Port Promise takes forty minutes. It should take forty-five. The clouds are pink on their bellies by the time I pull the machine up onto the dock ramp at the town harbor. The sun is dropping fast behind the range, throwing long purple shadows across the ice.
The dock is quiet. A few boats iced in for the season, canvas taut, mooring lines fuzzed with frost. Somebody's smoker breathes cedar down at the far end. My boots crunch on the frost.
Then I hear it.
The low, throaty drone of a radial engine.
It's faint at first, a vibration in the air that you feel in your teeth before you hear it with your ears. It grows. It echoes off the mountains. It disrupts the silence.
I scan the sky to the south, squinting against the fading light.
There.
