Reunited in the Snow

by Amalie Berlin

  “I’ve already been counting on you,” she whispered. “No amount of me telling you it wasn’t your fault is going to help, is it?”

  “A less selfish man would’ve heard him. That’s on me. I drove him to this with a threat to take away the last person in his family. And that’s on me, too.”

  Since she wasn’t moving from in front of the door, he gently as he could took her by the shoulders and moved her out of the way.

  “You can stay here. This is just a...it’s a bump,” she said behind him, and shifted when he gestured for her to move her nude body out of where people walking by could see in when he opened the door. “We can sort it out.”

  “I’m going to my cabin.”

  She reached a hand for him, eyes pleading. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. I’m sorry, too, that you keep trying to run from it. You can’t outrun painful memories. Punishing yourself for something beyond your control isn’t—”

  “It’s not punishing me.” He was dressed; there was nothing left to do but to go, and that’s exactly what he did. “It’s saving you and your children.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ACID SWIRLED THROUGH West’s middle, burning everything it touched, like it could eat through the very core of who he was.

  He couldn’t outrun it.

  Now that she knew about Charlie, about how that was one long string of everything that could’ve gone wrong for that kid, initiated or exacerbated by West’s decisions, she couldn’t think he’d be okay to help with her own family problems. She had to be realizing that right now.

  He closed the door on his cold, empty, tiny cabin, and dropped like lead onto the side of the bed.

  The last tenant had left the shade pulled down over the wee window he had in this one, to block out the constant summer sunshine and make sleep easier. But at that moment, it made the room smaller.

  Was the aurora still there? He hadn’t even looked at her window before going. If he watched the aurora maybe he’d feel that peace again. Maybe he would be distracted enough not to dwell on what he’d almost had, and what he never could.

  Leaning over, he rolled up the shade. The dark sky obliged his need, and he watched quietly as pink tendrils grew bolder, more intense, coming in waves from the side, like the tide washing across his window.

  Pink. Which she’d realized she loved, even if it had belonged to Ophelia. But he didn’t feel the peace he needed.

  He’d just broken up with her, and they would be trapped at Fletcher together, in the same department, forced to work together, for the next seven and a half months. God help him, this was a mistake. Dallas would’ve been fine. He could’ve stayed in Dallas.

  The pink waves broke red here and there, like warning bursts that made the back of his neck tighten and itch, and then the colors turned and wave after wave of bloody wave slithered across the night sky.

  What washed over him wasn’t a joyful, comforting peace; it was closer to an itch for physicality, also not the kind he preferred. He felt like prowling the corridors to keep from punching a wall.

  West yanked the shade back down over his window to hide it, and flopped back onto his cold, barren bed. He unfastened the chain on his neck to slide the ring off. Something to fidget with. Something to look at other than the alarm-increasing red skies.

  He slid the ring onto the middle section of his ring finger with effort, then flipped on the bedside lamp and swiveled his hand toward it to look at the thing.

  Vines and flowers in three different metals, because she loved rose gold, but he liked white gold, so they added the regular gold to provide balance to the two. They braided together in a vaguely Celtic style, because the vines were her history, and the knot was his.

  Flowers with tiny diamond centers dotted the vines, because grapes represent the harvest, but flowers represent the future harvest, what they were cultivating toward.

  Everything snaked around to support the chunky perfect diamond in the center, bracketed at four corners with tiny grape leaves.

  How long had it taken them to get the design to this point to submit to a jeweler? Two months? Two and a half? A long process. Back and forth. Ideas, requests, offers, counteroffers. If it had been left to him, she would’ve still loved it, because that’s the kind of person she was. But what had she called the ring? The physical representation of their promises for the future. Only they never could get that future going, it seemed. And he didn’t even know if that was a blessing or a curse. If he should’ve walked out, or should’ve stayed. He didn’t even know what was better for her anymore.

  Always had brought him back, but he didn’t know if he could stay, not without the confidence he would make her life better by doing so.

  When he’d left Charlie, he’d been thinking of himself. Maybe he was learning. But maybe it was too late for that.

  * * *

  Lia slept fitfully after West’s wild-eyed departure, with dreams mostly filled with meaninglessness.

  Her standing in a white room, surrounded by fast-moving grapes that bounced like tiny superballs.

  Her wearing a pair of shoes that judged everyone else’s footwear, loudly, and for all to hear.

  And the one good one, the one that felt like prophecy and instead of leaving her with a sense of frenetic, uncontrollable chaos in and around her, flowed over her like a warm, soaking bubble bath. She and West were painting a mural on the nursery wall at the manor, pink aurora on a field of purple. She didn’t know how she knew it had been a nursery, but it had.

  That comfort carried her through a long day without chasing him down and making him talk to her. She’d had West sightings, but zero interactions. He was grim-looking, but still functioning.

  With nothing to do, she had time to think, to inventory the clinic’s supply room, and think some more. Try to sort out her West-shaped riddle.

  Things could be fixed; they had to be fixable. She just wasn’t sure how to go about it. She didn’t even know if it was for her to fix. Seemed like the kind of thing that should be a joint effort, if they were ever going to make things work.

  And she had to find a way to put them on equal footing. He’d shared the kind of information that would make anyone feel vulnerable over, but most especially someone who blamed himself for the loss of someone he’d spent most of his life protecting.

  He thought he’d given her a weapon to use against him. She had to do the same for him. Get them on equal footing, show him she was still there and let him work out the rest.

  She’d taken one detour to visit Eileen Gossen, who had managed to stay at the station and was healing, and enlisted her help obtaining a small part from the shop.

  Now, at just after six, she stood outside the door of West’s cabin, and tapped one fingernail on the wood, but with the way her hands shook, it might sound like scratching to him.

  He opened the door, saw her standing there, then gestured her inside.

  “I’m not sure what there is to talk about,” he said, sitting on the edge of his bed, making the most of the little cabin room so it could hold two people without too much pain.

  She fiddled with the small gasket Eileen had dug up for her, worrying it between her shaking fingers as she spoke.

  “You don’t have to talk, just listen. I’m not staying long. I just want to tell you something.”

  “What thing?”

  “A thing I’ve been hiding, because I’m not going to try and pretend that we’re without some issues, or that we’re perfect together. I’m still sure I’ll never find someone who loves me like you do. I know I won’t find anyone else I love as much as you. And there’s no one I trust as much as you.”

  “You weren’t listening,” he said softly, sighing as he braced his elbows on his knees.

  In the cramped little room, she took one step, turned and sat on the edge of the bed beside him. “I heard every wo
rd you said, and I understand what it cost you to say it. So I’m here to do the same. And I’m here to say your words back to you. If you still want me, I’ll stay with you forever. Trust you, as I trust you now. My father left me the vineyard, and it is mine right now, in a sort of temporary ownership until I marry. Then it belongs to my husband. And he had it written up that way without specifying a name, or having someone in mind. He had it written before I met you, and I just didn’t find out until I was at home and he was gone.”

  “What?”

  “When I signed the papers, that was part of it. I don’t know how it would hold up in the courts, but what I do know is that it will hold up if I don’t ever challenge it. And that if you were my husband, I wouldn’t need to. Our children would still inherit, and it would still bear the Monterrosa name, because we’d hold to that fine Portuguese tradition of stacking names on names on names. Itamarati da Monterrosa MacIntyre. And I know you’ll do whatever you can to protect me, and them.”

  “Love,” he said, and it sounded like it took all his strength to say the word, but he’d still picked an endearment, which told her everything she needed to know. “I don’t know what you want.”

  “I want you. And I want you to prove to yourself that you can do more than break things and hurt people you love. You broke your streak of running from people who love you when things get hard. You broke the window and got us out of the lifeboat. Now break this pattern, and trust me like I trust you.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to look for a way to break my father’s silence. In a way that won’t hurt me, so in a way that won’t really hurt him.”

  He looked at her strangely, but for a moment, he didn’t look lost. “I don’t know your father.”

  “But you know me,” she said, then reached into her pocket to pull out a piece of paper rolled up like a scroll, with an electric blue silicone gasket wrapped around it to hold it closed. “That’s his email address. He’s been ignoring me.”

  He took it, rolled the slim blue band off the paper, and when he went to throw it in the trash, she grabbed his hand. “Eileen looked hard for that for me. Keep it safe.”

  “Rubber washer?”

  “Gasket, a small version of what you dug out of the window for us, and I think just about the perfect size for a makeshift wedding ring. You know, if you do decide you want me still.” She leaned up and pressed a quick kiss to his stunned cheek, then stood up to make her exit. “We still have about seven months to make this work. But I’m not a patient woman, so don’t expect me to give up on you already.”

  Still using words he’d said to her, and praying they both remembered them correctly—the conversion of short-to long-term memory was harder when a brain was saturated with cortisol or oxytocin.

  * * *

  The next morning, knocking at her cabin door yanked Lia from sleep, her heart instantly pounding as she scrambled out of bed.

  The last she remembered looking at the clock, it had been about three, hours after she’d left West, and the amount of time it had taken for her to work through the nerves knotting in her stomach. A glance at it now confirmed she’d gotten just about three hours of sleep. Her radio hadn’t gone off. Not an emergency.

  She staggered to the door, wearing her favorite pink pajamas, and wrenched it open.

  West stood there, laptop tucked under one arm, looking tired, as she’d grown used to seeing him.

  He gestured to the room, brows up and questioning. “I have an idea.”

  He had an idea. The stressed awakening had popped her heart rate up, but those four little words turned it from a possibly scary situation, to one of hope.

  She stepped back, pulling the door open wider so he could enter, peeked past him to be sure that the clinic was still dark, then closed the door.

  Quietly, he sat on the corner of her bed, propped the laptop on his lap and opened it. “About your father...is he as proud of the vineyard and village, all that, as you are?”

  “I seem prideful about it?” she asked, not following at all, but unable not to frame it that way with the rest of her chaotic thoughts about the vineyard.

  “It’s something you should be proud of. Is he? Does he love it? Is that why he’s been running, do you think?”

  “Oh.” She squeezed her eyes shut and then knuckled the sleep out of them before she answered his question. “Yes. He loves the vineyard and the history of it. He always enjoyed the pomp—when we receive orders every year for the same ceremonies and celebrations. He just doesn’t like the work bits. Not good at them.”

  Though her eyes were still gritty with sleep, she sat beside him and waited to see if her answer aligned with his idea.

  “I know you don’t approve of cutting off his access to funds or having him arrested for arson,” he began. “Too risky. If he’s not thinking straight, depriving him of money might send him off the rails. And requests haven’t been working.”

  “Right,” she said slowly, working to keep any alarm or dismay from her face or voice.

  “With the caveat that I only know a few things about him, that he’s a jerk to his daughter and that makes me want to punch him in the face, that he probably wouldn’t mind that much since he was almost arrested for brawling in Barcelona, and that he loves his vineyard and almost burned it down, so...guilt.”

  She tried to keep following along, but her brain was still fritzing. “Still not following.”

  “I think the best chance of getting a response from him is to pick a fight about the vineyard. If it were me, I’d respond faster to a fight than a request,” he said, then added, “I did actually respond to a fight when you showed up here.”

  She’d emailed West so many times, requesting, pleading, for him to answer, and he hadn’t. She hadn’t even thought to ask if he’d read her messages, or maybe had seen and deleted them, maybe blocked them. So...he had seen them, maybe even read them.

  “Don’t do that,” he said suddenly, breaking into her thoughts. “You can yell at me later—the satellite will be here soon. Stay with me a little longer.”

  “I don’t know his other weak points.” And the idea of exploiting weak points made her uneasy, but at the same time... West was helping. Or trying. “Did you sleep last night?”

  “Red aurora kept me up.” He gave her a lopsided and still-half-guarded grin. “I think we know enough weaknesses to pick a fight. I think if we pick a fight with him, if I pick a fight with him about the vineyard, he’ll answer me.”

  “What do you mean? What kind of fight?”

  “A dirty fight.” He turned the laptop around to show her an opened, unsent email. Where his fingers bent around the edge of the screen, she saw her ring crammed down as far as it would go on his ring finger, just past that first knuckle, and on that same finger sat the blue silicone gasket. He was wearing their rings, not just on a chain around his neck, hidden away.

  She squeezed her eyes shut again, trying to find some focus.

  “Just read it.”

  A deep breath, and she did as he asked.

  He didn’t call him names. Didn’t point fingers. The email was written like a very professional letter between businessmen, stating that she had agreed with him to give up making wine. And begin making whiskey, since proper Scotch couldn’t be made in Portugal. Too many of the Monterrosa grape vines had been destroyed, so they were going to plant barley, which would enable brewing to resume in one growing season instead of the years it would take for the vineyards to get back to what was needed.

  It took her all the way to the bottom page where he’d included a fake logo to realize that this was just bait, not an actual proposal from him to switch production to whiskey. West had lied. Claimed a quiet elopement days ago, and that as the sole owner of the vineyard now they could make this decision without involving him. But, man-to-man, he felt he owed him a chance to co
nvince him otherwise. And attached a deadline.

  Two days, followed by the logo MacIntyre Whiskey. Not even Monterrosa Whiskey. He was going for the jugular, right in the pride centers.

  “Where did you get the logo?”

  “I doodled the barley with the stylus that came with the laptop, then put it on an oval, then stacked up some bigger ovals in black and white to make a frame. Picked from the fonts on the computer. It took a lot longer to make the logo than to write the inflammatory email.”

  “Oh.” She blinked a bit at the email, then read it again, her brain still soggy with sleep. “You think he’ll answer to stop us from pretend-doing this? It is pretend, right?”

  “Of course it’s pretend. I’m feeling a bit bitter that I had to smash your bottle of port to pry out the lifeboat windows. I definitely want to drink that in the future.”

  The future. She couldn’t think about the future. Couldn’t ask about it, either. It didn’t mean anything that he’d done this until he said it meant something.

  “Are you going to send it?”

  “Not without your approval,” he said, then added, “That’s how we designed the ring. Do you remember?”

  “We had to agree?”

  “Veto power.” He reached up to brush her hair back from her face, then tuck a lock behind her ear.

  She nodded, somehow managed to resist tilting her head into his hand and focused on the idea still rolling around in her head. If it didn’t work, did it cause any harm? Her father couldn’t be angrier with her for trying anything to get him to surface.

  “It’s about ten minutes before the satellite passes over,” he added. “Which was why I knocked to wake you up early.”

  What time was it in Portugal when the satellite passed over? Seven in the morning would be ten in the morning. Still morning. He’d have time to respond, and maybe even fire off an angry response immediately.

  She moved the mouse to hover over the address bar, considered the email address she’d given him, then scraped her memory to come up with two more. That done, she hovered over the Send button and nodded to him to do it. “Those are all the ones I know of. But I don’t know if he’s checking them.”