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“I’m terribly sorry,” the woman said in English, “but it’s not a good time. Perhaps you have a business card? I’d be happy to pass it along to my husband and ask him to call you.”
Matteo fired up his mental rolodex. “Mrs. Hauser—Hauser nee Weiss, is that right? I believe I went to school with your cousin, Benjamin.”
She thawed infinitesimally. “You know Bennie?”
“I do indeed. We played polo together. Bennie was a legendon the field.” He switched to German and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I will admit to having beenwildlyjealous back in the day. I sodesperatelywanted to play number one, but he was too talented. I was always stuck with the feed.” She smiled, softening a little more, leaning forward. He almost had her. He switched back to English so Ms. Delaney wouldn’t get lost. “Oh! I’m just remembering: one of Bennie’s cousins represented Eldovia in the last Olympics—as a skier, I believe. That wasn’tyou, by any chance, was it?”
The over-the-top, performatively awestruck question he already knew the answer to yielded a genuine smile. “It was.”
“Well, athletic talent must run in the family. I’mhonoredto meet you.”
“And you are?”
“Oh, Ibegyour pardon, Icompletelyforgot my manners.” That was a lie. Matteo never forgot his manners. He had been known to “forget” them, though, when to do so served his purposes. He straightened to his full height. “I am Matteo Benz, equerry to His Majesty King Emil. Delighted to meet you.”
Mrs. Hauser’s eyebrows flew up, and she stepped back and opened the door fully. “Let me see if I can interrupt my husband. Please come in.”
She turned, and Matteo dropped his facade for a moment, making eye contact with Ms. Delaney and sending her a little eye roll. She sent back a furtive thumbs-up gesture.
He’d attempted to set a falsely conspiratorial tone with Mrs. Hauser, but with Ms. Delaney, it was real.
It was rather pleasant to be in league with someone. He wasn’t sure when he had last been. Well, no, that wasn’t true. He wasin league with Kai every December. But this felt different. As he watched Ms. Delaney hand her coat over to a housekeeper, he was forced to conclude that it was rather nice to be in league with Ms. Delaney specifically.
Oh, dear.
They’d kept their visit quick, but a dismaying amount of snow had accumulated while they’d been inside Daniel Hauser’s house. After cleaning off the car, Matteo pulled out his phone to do a weather check, noting that this was the second time he’d lost track of worsening, potentially dangerous weather because he’d gotten carried away with Ms. Delaney. Last time it had been sharing confidences by the fire. This time, it had been talking their way into Daniel Hauser’s house and confronting the man himself. He had done the former, and Ms. Delaney had done the latter, the two of them working together seamlessly. He’d felt almost as if they were Jedi working to defeat a common enemy.
But he had to remind himself that they were engaging in a strategic alliance. She wasn’t his ally, not in the context of the wider war.
“How do you decide if it’s safe to drive?” Ms. Delaney asked as he tapped through his weather app. “How much snow is too much snow?”
“It’s partly accumulation, partly wind, partly visibility. It’s a judgment call. But sometimes—” Oh, no.
“Sometimes what?”
He tapped on an alert that popped up. “Sometimes the choice is made for you because there’s an avalanche in your way.”
“What? What does that mean?”
He turned the phone to her. She couldn’t read the German headline, but she could see the picture, and her eyes widened. “It means we cannot get back to Witten tonight.”
He expected her to get upset, but she surprised him by saying, calmly, “All right. So what do we do?”
The snow was still falling, so much so that the car was re-coated in a layer of it even though he’d cleaned it off a mere minute ago. “We go to my mother’s.”
There was a pause, and she burst out laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not laughing at you. I just didn’t expect you to say that.”
He smiled. “I told you before that I grew up near Riems?” She nodded. “It’s about a ten-minute drive to the village I’m from, though in this weather it will take longer. There’s an inn there.”
“We’re ten minutes away from your family? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“It wasn’t relevant.”
“But you told me last time we were here that you missed your family. We could have stopped. Well, I guess we are now, but we could have regardless!”
“Yes, but we’re working. A detour to visit my family was not on your agenda. Or mine.” He thought back to his earlier text exchange with Imogen. Now he was going to be leaving Kai hanging even longer. He was going to have to start pulling all-nighters to get the baskets ready.
“Yes, but we’re so close! You can’t use work as an excuse not to see your family when you’re passing right by!”
