Page 14 of In the Crease

“Hotel security doesn’t just⁠—”

“Maren. I was there.”

“You’ve also told this story four times, and the details keep changing.”

Griffin looked at me. “She’s been here one day.”

“I’m not involved,” I said.

She turned to look at me, and with her in the middle of the bench that was closer than I’d been managing all morning. “You’ve really just let this happen for four years.”

“Tried to intervene once. He kept going for eleven more minutes.”

“That tracks.” She turned back to the windshield, and I caught the edge of her smile in my peripheral vision and kept my eyes on the road.

The landscape opened up past the campus edge, flat farmland, fields still white in the low places, birch stands at the margins bare and pale against a gray February sky, everything stripped down. Maren went quiet and watched it the same way she had when I drove her from the airport.

I was watching the road. Mostly.

“It’s very flat,” she said.

“Minnesota,” I said with a chuckle.

“Griffin said it was beautiful.”

“It grows on you,” I said.

“Does it?”

“Yeah.”

She looked back out the window. I kept driving.

She turned to look at me instead of the window. “What are you looking at?”

“Thanks for letting me come with you guys. It’s nice to get a little break,” she replied with a shy smile.

I wanted to reach up and put my arm around her. Instead, I let a grin form and said, “Of course. You’re welcome anytime.” I turned back to the road; we were getting close.

Neither of us said anything else. Griffin was still talking. I’d stopped hearing him completely.

I turned onto the barely plowed lane toward Jensen’s property. The birch trees came up close on both sides, white-barked and bare. The sounds came through before I cut the engine—blades on ice, voices carrying clean and cold, the hollow knock of a puck.

Maren pressed both hands flat against the dash.

The low winter light came through the birches at an angle and caught her face, and her expression went completely open—nothing held back, pure response to the thing in front of her. It was like watching a kid at Christmas. It landed in my chest like a bruise I put directly into the category of not helpful.

“Griffin,” she said in a hush. “It looks exactly like the photo.”

“Told you,” he said.

I put the truck in Park. Sat for exactly one moment taking her in with the engine off. Then I got out and went around to get the gear and to give myself the walk and the space.

Chapter Six

Maren

I stepped out of the truck and the cold came for me immediately. Again. A deeper cold than the airport. This one had been here for weeks, settled into the ground and the trees and everything else. The airport cold had been a surprise. This was a fact of life, indifferent to how I felt about it.