Innkeeper Mode

"Your bag?" Callie asks.

"On the bridge. I'll get it in the morning."

"Hub will get it when he plows. Hub gets everything." She comes around the desk. She's taller than you remember, or she's standing straighter. Work boots, jeans, the reindeer staring at you with its pom-pom nose. "Dinner's at seven. Stew and cornbread. If you have allergies, I'll need to know."

"You know my allergies."

The smile doesn't move. "I'll need to know," she says again, pleasantly, "because I don't assume things about guests."

The man with the silver mustache makes a small sound, like someone watching a tennis match.

"No allergies," you say.

"Wonderful. This way, Ms. Ava."

Ms. You follow her up the back stairs because there's nothing else to do.

The inn smells the same. That's the first cruelty. Woodsmoke and cinnamon and old pine floors and the lemon oil Aunt Peggy used on every banister. The stairs creak in the same places, third step and seventh. Your body remembers to skip them. Hers does too. You both step over the seventh at the same time and neither of you says a word.

At the top of the back stairs there's a short hall and one door. She unlocks it with a second key from her pocket, because the first one is in your hand, and you both pretend not to notice that she carries a key to this room on her own ring.

"Fireplace is laid," she says. "Matches on the mantel. Extra towels in the armoire. The radiator's old, it makes noise, it's harmless. Wi-Fi password is on the card. Checkout is at eleven, though nobody's checking out anytime soon."

She steps back to let you in.

You don't go in right away. You stand in the doorway and look.

Nobody has slept here. You can tell. The quilt is the white one with the blue birds stitched in the corners, the one her grandmother's church group made for the wedding. The window seat has the same cushions. The old writing desk is under the window with its green glass lamp. And on the mantel, over the cold fireplace, there's a garland of pine and white ribbon that has dried to the color of paper. Little brown needles have fallen on the hearth in a fine, sad line.

She hung it on December 19th. You helped her. You stood on that chair and she held your hips so you wouldn't fall and said, If you break your neck before the wedding I'm marrying Dacey's snowmobile.

"Cal," you say.

"The radiator," she says, as if you hadn't spoken, "sometimes sulks. If it does, let me know at the desk."

"Callie."

She looks at you then. Really looks, for the first time since the lobby. Her eyes are the color they always were, sea-glass green, the kind of green that makes strangers on the street stop and say sorry, your eyes, and she always laughed and said I know, they came like that. Up close you can see what five years did. Nothing. They did nothing to her face. She's more beautiful than she was at twenty-six, which feels like a personal attack.

What they did is behind her eyes. It's a locked door.

"Dinner's at seven," she says, and leaves.

You stand under the hot shower until your feet stop hurting. You put on the same sweater because you have one sweater. You check your phone. Sunniva again: ??? Ping me. Your mother: Saw the snow on the news!! Text me when you're somewhere warm, baby.

You text your mom: Somewhere warm. Safe. Love you.

You don't tell her where.

Dinner is at a long farm table in front of the lobby hearth, because the dining room is too cold to heat, Callie announces, and because, says the man with the silver mustache, "a storm is a party that hasn't been introduced to itself yet."

He introduces himself. Teodoro Quintana. Retired costume designer, forty years at an opera house in San Francisco. Beside him, a quiet man with close-cut gray hair and reading glasses folded into his sweater collar, who shakes your hand like he's taking your pulse.

"Yusuf Ambler. His husband. Retired judge. And you are?"

"Ava."

"Welcome, Ava. Don't let him seat you next to anyone."

"I seat people where the story is," Teodoro says, and seats you directly across from Callie's empty chair.

The four men in red flannel are the Four Flannels, a barbershop quartet from Hartford headed to a holiday festival in Stowe that will now be happening without them. Their lead is a huge, rosy-cheeked man named Bud Cosgrove who hugs you instead of shaking hands and says, "Any friend of the snow!" Two honeymooners from Montreal hold hands under the table and speak in soft French. A group of college friends on a ski trip take up one end of the table and look at their phones like their phones owe them money.

Callie serves the stew herself. She moves around the table with a ladle and a smile, refilling cider, remembering everyone's name, asking Bud about his knee and the honeymooners about their flight. People light up when she gets to them. They can't help it. You watch the skiers stop scrolling. You watch one of them, a lanky boy with a ski-lift tan who must be twenty-two at most, follow her down the table with his eyes like a sunflower.

"Is she real?" he whispers to his friend. "Like is she a real person?"

"She's been on the cover of a maple syrup tin," Bud says, overhearing, delighted. "I bought three."

Callie gets to you last. She fills your bowl. Her wrist is right there by your hand and she has a burn on it, a new one, pink and healing, and you want to ask, and you don't.

"Thank you," you say.

"Of course." The smile. "Enjoy."

She sits. Teodoro, who has been waiting for this all night, folds his hands on the table.

"So," he says. "How do you two know each other?"

Every fork stops. Even the skiers.

Callie doesn't even blink. "We used to know each other," she says. "A long time ago. More cornbread, Teo?"

"I wasn't asking about the cornbread."

"I know," says Callie, sunny as a June morning. "That's why I offered it."

Yusuf laughs into his napkin. Bud starts humming something to cover the silence, and the other three Flannels drift in under him, and for a second the room relaxes. You almost relax. You pick up your spoon.

The front door bangs open.

A man stomps in out of the storm in a plaid hat and an orange vest, snow up to his thighs, a CB radio clipped to his shoulder squawking static. He's carrying your suitcase. He sets it down on the mat and beats his gloves together.

"Callie-girl, there's a rental car nose-down by the bridge, I brought the bag up, whose—" He sees you. He stops. His face goes through surprise and recognition and something like delight. "Well, I'll be."

You know him. Hub Breckenridge, who plows the whole town and knows everyone's business by noon. He was going to drive the wedding guests up from the parking lot on his tractor wagon.

"Hub," Callie says. Warning.

Hub doesn't hear warnings. Hub has never heard a warning in his life.

"Well, I'll be," he booms again, pointing at you with one snowy glove, to the whole silent table. "The runaway bride."