Chapter 3

I didn't flush.

The ring sat at the bottom of the toilet bowl, catching the light like it always had—like it was performing, even now. Gold. Eighteen karats. The kind of thing you're supposed to pass down to your daughters.

I'd worn it for thirty years on a finger it never quite fit. Grant had proposed the year I'd starved myself thin for my sister's wedding, and by the time I'd eaten my way back to myself, the ring was already sized wrong. A permanent reminder that I'd shrunk to fit his vision of me before he'd even asked.

I stood there in Rowan's bathroom, wearing his flannel shirt—dark green, too wide at the shoulders, the collar falling open past my collarbone—and stared at the white groove on my ring finger. A brand. An indent in my own skin from something that never belonged there.

A knock at the door. Low, unhurried.

"Breakfast is ready." Rowan's voice, rough with morning, like gravel settling after a rockslide.

I opened the door.

His eyes dropped to my hand first. Just for a second—less than a second—before they came back up to meet mine. He didn't say anything. His mouth didn't move toward a smile. But his left eyebrow lifted, barely, the faintest shift in an otherwise still face. Something that wasn't quite approval and wasn't quite surprise. Something that said *good* without making a sound.

He turned toward the kitchen. And as he did, I caught it—the way his tongue moved briefly against his teeth, a small unconscious thing, there and gone before I could be sure I'd seen it at all.

I followed him.

---

The storm hadn't broken. If anything, it had settled in deeper overnight, the kind of blizzard that stops apologizing for itself. The windows were white. The road back down the mountain was gone.

Rowan put eggs and toast in front of me without ceremony. He poured coffee, black, and set it beside the plate. Then he sat across from me and ate like a man who had no interest in filling silence with noise.

I ate too. I was hungrier than I'd expected.

Afterward, he built the fire back up from the banked coals. I watched him for a while, the way he worked—economical, precise, nothing wasted. Then he looked over his shoulder at me.

"Come here," he said. "You should know how to do this."

I almost laughed. *I'm fifty-two years old.* But I crossed the room and crouched beside him, and he handed me a split log without preamble.

"Angle matters more than force," he said. "You're not feeding it. You're giving it room to breathe."

He moved behind me. His arms came around mine, not holding me—adjusting me. His hands over my hands, tilting the log, shifting my grip. His breath landed warm against the back of my neck, just above my collar.

I went rigid.

Every muscle in my back locked up like a door bolted from the inside. Thirty years of a man's hands on me, and I'd forgotten—completely, entirely forgotten—what it felt like to be touched without an agenda. Without the weight of a lie underneath it.

Rowan didn't press. He just held the position, steady, until I felt the stiffness begin to leave me. Slow. Like wax near heat. Like something I'd been clenching for so long I'd stopped knowing I was doing it.

The fire caught.

I stared at it.

"You don't ask questions," I said.

His chin was near my shoulder. I felt the words more than heard them. "You don't owe me your story. You owe yourself peace."

I turned. We were close—closer than I'd realized, close enough that when I moved, the space between us nearly disappeared. His eyes were very green in the firelight.

"What if peace feels like betrayal?" I asked.

His thumb moved to my face. Slow. He dragged it across my lower lip, barely touching, the way you'd test the edge of something sharp.

"Then let it burn," he said. "Burn it all down."

The fire popped between us. Neither of us moved.

---

My phone started an hour later.

Not a call. Texts, one after another, stacking up like accusations.

*You've lost your mind.*

*Sloane you'll freeze to death.*

*I'm calling the police.*

*Please just answer me.*

*PLEASE.*

I read the first three. Then I dropped the phone onto the couch cushion like it had burned me, which in a way it had.

Rowan's hand appeared from nowhere. He caught the phone before it slid to the floor. One motion—clean, unhesitating. He looked at the screen for exactly as long as he needed to, then his thumb moved and moved and moved, and when he set the phone back down, the notifications were gone.

All of them.

I looked at him.

"Signal tower might be back up by tomorrow," he said, his voice flat and even. "He'll come up the mountain."

"How do you know?"

His eyes shifted to the window, to the white nothing beyond the glass. Something moved through his expression—not quite shadow, but close. The look of a man who'd learned things about human nature he'd rather not have learned.

"Because if I were him," he said, "I'd be out of my mind trying to find you. Not because you belong to him." He paused. "Because he knows he doesn't deserve you. And fear moves faster than love. Always has."

The room was very quiet after that.

---

I fell asleep in front of the fire without meaning to. One moment the flames were there, amber and shifting, and then there was nothing—just the deep, dreamless dark of a body that had finally given out.

When I surfaced, the fire had burned low.

I was on my side, and I was warm, and something was moving through my hair.

I lay still for a moment before I understood. My head was in Rowan's lap. His hand moved through my hair slowly—not stroking, exactly. More like combing. Working through the tangles at the ends with his fingers, patient and methodical, the same way he'd done everything else. Like I was something worth taking care of.

I didn't move. I wasn't sure I could.

Thirty years. Thirty years of sleeping beside a man who'd stopped seeing me somewhere in the middle of them, and I couldn't remember the last time anyone had touched me like I wasn't an inconvenience.

My phone lit up on the coffee table.

I saw it before Rowan did—Grant's name, and beneath it: *Location sharing request.*

Rowan saw it a second later. His hand didn't stop moving through my hair. He didn't reach for the phone. He just looked at it, then looked down at me, and I knew he could tell I was awake.

He lowered his head and pressed his lips to my forehead. Warm. Unhurried. Like a period at the end of a sentence he'd been writing for a long time.

"Choose me," he said quietly, "or choose him. But don't choose out of fear."

The screen glowed between us.

Outside, the storm held the mountain in its fist and refused to let go.