Chapter 3: The Confession
The kitchen door clicked shut behind them, and the sound was swallowed whole by the storm. The porch light flickered overhead, buzzing faintly, casting a sickly yellow glow that barely reached past the railing. Beyond that, the world had gone white and shapeless, the treeline erased, the sky erased, everything erased except the snow falling in thick, relentless curtains.
Mary's arms were wrapped around herself, her breath coming in short, uneven bursts. She still wouldn't look at Ivy. Her eyes were fixed on some point in the middle distance, on the nothing that waited past the porch, and her jaw was set so tight Ivy could see the muscle jumping beneath her skin.
Ivy stood three feet away. The distance felt like a canyon.
"You're going to freeze to death out here," she said.
"I told you. I don't care."
"Then care about something else." Ivy's voice was sharper than she intended, and she saw Mary flinch. She softened, just slightly. "You can be angry with me. You can hate me. But don't stand out here and let yourself get hypothermia because you don't want to be in the same room as me."
Mary finally turned. Her eyes were wet, though whether from the cold or something else, Ivy couldn't tell. The tears hadn't fallen yet, but they were there, pooling at the corners, catching the weak porch light like something liquid and alive.
"I don't hate you," Mary said. The words came out cracked, thin. "That's the problem."
The wind shifted. It came around the corner of the cottage, cutting across the porch like a blade, and Mary shivered so hard her teeth chattered. Ivy watched her, watched the way her arms tightened around herself, the way she seemed to curl inward against the cold, and something in her chest twisted painfully.
She stepped forward.
One step. Then another. The distance between them shrank, foot by foot, until Ivy was close enough to feel the cold radiating off Mary's coat, close enough to see the individual flakes of snow caught in her dark hair.
"You're lying to me," Ivy said quietly. "I know you're lying to me about something. I don't know what, and I don't know why, but I can feel it. It's been there for weeks, and it's getting worse."
Mary's breath hitched. She looked away again, but this time Ivy reached out and caught her chin, turning her face back, forcing her to meet her eyes.
"I'm not going to push you," Ivy said. "I'm not going to demand answers you're not ready to give. But I need you to know that whatever it is, whatever you're hiding, it's eating you alive. I can see it. And I'm scared, Mary. I'm scared for you."
The tears finally fell.
Mary made a sound, something between a sob and a gasp, and then she was moving, closing the last few inches between them, her hands coming up to grip the front of Ivy's jacket. She pulled her close, and Ivy let herself be pulled, and for a moment they just stood there, foreheads touching, breath mingling in the cold air, saying nothing at all.
Then Mary kissed her.
It wasn't hesitant. Whatever had been building for weeks—the stolen glances, the silences that lasted a beat too long, the way they'd both learned to stand just slightly out of each other's reach—broke all at once, and Mary kissed her like she'd been holding her breath for months and had finally been allowed to breathe. Ivy made a small, startled sound against her mouth before she kissed her back, one hand rising to cup Mary's jaw, the other fisting in the front of her coat to pull her closer still.
The cold disappeared. The wind, the snow, the porch rail digging into Ivy's back—none of it mattered. There was only the warmth of Mary's mouth against hers, insistent and searching, and the soft, broken noise Mary made when Ivy kissed her back just as fiercely. Mary's fingers slid up into Ivy's hair, snow-damp and cold, and she tilted her head to deepen the kiss, and Ivy let her, let herself be kissed like that—hungrily, desperately, like an apology and a confession all at once.
"I've wanted to tell you," Mary breathed against her lips, barely pulling back far enough to speak. "For weeks. I've wanted to. I just don't know how."
"Then don't tell me tonight," Ivy murmured. "Just—" She kissed her again before she could finish the sentence, softer this time, but no less certain. "Just stay here. That's enough for now."
Mary let out a shuddering breath that dissolved into another kiss, her hands framing Ivy's face like she was trying to memorize it by touch. When they finally broke apart, both of them were breathing hard, foreheads pressed together, and Mary let out a small, disbelieving laugh, as though she couldn't quite believe she'd allowed herself this.
"I've thought about that for so long," she admitted quietly.
"Me too," Ivy said. "God, me too."
Mary rested her head against Ivy's shoulder, and Ivy wrapped both arms around her, and they stayed like that, swaying slightly, the wind pulling at their coats, the snow gathering in their hair and along the collars of their jackets. Neither of them moved to go back inside. Neither of them wanted to be the first to let go.
"I keep thinking about the first night we met," Mary said after a while, her voice muffled against Ivy's shoulder. "You were so sure of everything. I remember thinking, God, I want to be like that. I want to be someone who just says what she means."
Ivy huffed out something like a laugh. "I'm not sure of anything. I just don't let people see the part where I'm not."
"That's worse, somehow."
"Is it?"
"It means you've been scared this whole time too. I just didn't know it." Mary pulled back far enough to look at her, snow catching in her lashes, her cheeks pink from cold. "I always thought you had it figured out. That I was the mess and you were just—patient with me. Like I was something you were managing."
"You were never something I was managing." Ivy's voice cracked slightly on the word never, and she hated how much it gave away. "I don't know how to explain what you are to me without it sounding bigger than either of us can hold right now. So I didn't try. I just stood next to you and hoped you'd figure it out on your own."
"I did figure it out." Mary's laugh was watery. "I just didn't know what to do with it. Noelle and I—" She stopped herself.
"You don't have to talk about her."
"I want to. I think I need to, actually, before I lose my nerve." Mary took a breath, steadying herself. "It's not that I don't care about her. I do. That's what makes it so awful. It would be so much easier if I didn't. But caring about her and wanting you were never the same feeling, even when I tried to convince myself they could be."
Ivy said nothing. She simply reached up and brushed a strand of damp hair from Mary's face, tucking it gently behind her ear, and the tenderness of the gesture seemed to undo something in Mary all over again.
"I'm not asking you to choose anything tonight," Ivy said finally. "I don't want you making decisions standing outside in a blizzard because you're scared and cold and I kissed you. I want you to be sure. For you. Not for me."
"I am sure." Mary's voice firmed, even as her hands trembled faintly where they rested against Ivy's chest. "That's the part that terrifies me. I've spent months telling myself I wasn't. It was so much easier to believe I was confused."
"And now?"
"Now I don't think I've been confused about anything in my entire life the way I'm confused about how to fix what I've done to everyone by finally admitting it."
The wind gusted hard enough to rattle the porch rail, and Mary flinched, curling instinctively closer to Ivy's side. Ivy tightened her arms around her without thinking, some old, automatic instinct to shield her from the cold—and from everything else that was coming, though she couldn't have said that part out loud even if she'd tried.
For a while neither of them spoke. The porch light buzzed and dimmed and steadied again. Somewhere beyond the railing, the storm had thickened into something almost solid, a wall of white that swallowed the yard whole, the treeline, the fence, the shed where Grace claimed to have gotten lost earlier that evening. Ivy found herself staring into it without meaning to, some old, wary part of her cataloguing the dark the way she catalogued everything—out of habit, out of the need to know where every exit was before she let herself feel safe anywhere.
"You're doing it again," Mary murmured against her collarbone.
"Doing what?"
"Counting things. I can feel you doing it. Your whole body goes still and careful."
"Old habit."
"One of these days you're going to have to tell me where it comes from."
"One of these days," Ivy agreed, and left it at that, because some truths took longer to give away than others, and this one wasn't leaving her mouth tonight, not with Mary's confession still hanging warm and fragile in the air between them.
Mary shifted against her, tucking herself more fully into the curve of Ivy's body, as if trying to disappear into the warmth of her, into the moment itself, before the world could reach in and take it back. "Can I ask you something?"
"Always."
"When did you know? About me. About—this." Mary gestured vaguely between them, a small, helpless motion.
Ivy considered the question honestly, turning it over before she answered, because Mary deserved better than a glib reply. "The night of the bonfire. Back in October. You were telling that story about your grandmother's garden, the one with the crooked fence, and you laughed at your own joke before anyone else even understood what was funny." She shook her head slightly, remembering. "I just remember thinking I wanted to hear you laugh like that for the rest of my life. It scared the hell out of me."
"I don't remember telling that story."
"You wouldn't. You'd had three glasses of Gabriel's terrible wine by then."
Mary laughed—a real one this time, bright and surprised, cutting through the heaviness that had settled over the porch. It faded quickly, but for a moment it had been there, unguarded, and Ivy held onto the sound of it like something she could keep.
"I wish it could always be that easy," Mary said. "Just—laughing. Not all of this. Not the sneaking around, the lying, the way I flinch every time Noelle looks at me like she already knows."
"Does she know?"
Mary's jaw tightened. "I don't know what she knows. I don't know what anyone knows anymore. That's the exhausting part—trying to remember which version of myself I've shown to which person. It's like I've been performing for so long I've forgotten what's actually true underneath it."
"This is true," Ivy said, gesturing between them, echoing Mary's own gesture back at her. "Whatever else is a mess, this part isn't."
"I want to believe that."
"Then believe it. Just for tonight. We can be terrified again tomorrow."
Mary huffed out something between a laugh and a sob, and pressed her face into Ivy's shoulder again, breathing her in like she was trying to memorize this too, the smell of her coat, the cold air, the low hum of the storm around them. Ivy held her through it, one hand moving in slow circles against her back, and for a while neither of them spoke, content to simply exist in the small, fragile pocket of peace they'd carved out for themselves on a freezing porch in the middle of a blizzard.
"I don't deserve you being this patient with me," Mary murmured.
"You don't have to deserve it. That's not how it works."
Mary laughed, short and wet, half a sob. "You always say things like that. Like it's simple."
"It is simple. You're just used to things being complicated."
Mary pulled back enough to look at her, and something passed between them—old, tired, and tender all at once. She reached up and brushed a fleck of snow from Ivy's cheek, her fingers cold, her touch careful.
"I love you," Mary said. The words came out plain, almost startled, as though she hadn't meant to say them yet.
Ivy went very still.
"I know," she said finally, quietly. "I love you too."
For a moment, neither of them said anything else. The porch light buzzed. The snow fell. It should have felt like relief, saying it out loud after weeks of silence, but there was something underneath it, some current of dread that neither of them could name, and it kept them from smiling, kept the moment from settling into anything easy.
Ivy was about to say something else—she wasn't sure what, only that she needed to fill the silence before it swallowed them both—when the door at the far end of the porch creaked open.
Both of them turned at once.
A figure stood framed in the doorway, backlit by the warm light of the kitchen, features lost to shadow. For a long second, no one moved. No one spoke. The wind seemed to pause with them, as though even the storm were waiting to see what would happen next.
Ivy's mind raced through possibilities even as her body stayed frozen—the height was wrong for Gabriel, too slight for Chester, and whoever it was hadn't called out, hadn't laughed, hadn't done any of the things a person might do upon stumbling onto something private and unexpected. They had simply stood there. Watching. Silent.
Then the figure stepped back, fast, almost stumbling in their hurry, and the door swung shut with a soft, decisive click. Footsteps retreated across the kitchen floor, quick and uneven, fading toward the great room.
"Was that—" Mary started.
"I don't know." Ivy's heart was hammering. She wiped at her eyes quickly, as though that alone could erase what had just happened. "I couldn't tell who it was."
"Do you think they heard us? Saw us?"
"I don't know," Ivy said again, and this time her voice cracked around the words. "Maybe. Probably."
Mary wrapped her arms around herself once more, the warmth of a moment ago already draining out of her. "Great. That's just—that's perfect."
"It doesn't matter right now," Ivy said, though she didn't entirely believe it. "Whoever it was, they're gone. We should go back in before someone starts asking where we've been."
Mary nodded, but she didn't move right away. She stared at the door for a long moment, as if she could still see the shape of whoever had stood there, watching them, before vanishing back into the house. Her hands were shaking, and it wasn't entirely from the cold.
"What if they tell someone?" Mary asked quietly. "What if it gets back to her before I've even figured out how to say it myself?"
"Then we deal with that when it happens. We don't have to have every answer tonight." Ivy reached out and took Mary's hand, lacing their fingers together, grounding her. "One thing at a time. Right now, we just need to walk back inside and act normal, whatever normal even looks like after everything that's happened tonight."
"Normal." Mary let out a short, humorless laugh. "I don't remember what that word means anymore."
"Neither do I. We'll fake it together."
That, at least, drew a small, tired smile from Mary, the first real one since they'd stepped outside. She squeezed Ivy's hand once, hard, and then let go, smoothing down the front of her coat, composing herself the way Ivy imagined she must have learned to do a hundred times before, in a hundred other rooms, with a hundred other secrets tucked carefully out of sight.
"Ivy." Her voice was smaller now. "What if it was her?"
Ivy didn't have to ask who she meant. The question sat between them, unanswered, and neither of them wanted to be the one to say it out loud.
"We'll find out," Ivy said. "Come on. Let's go inside before we freeze."
They crossed the porch together, snow crunching beneath their boots, and Ivy pulled the door open. The warmth of the cottage rushed out to meet them, and for a moment neither of them moved to step through it, as though crossing that threshold would make everything that had just happened irreversibly real.
Then Mary stepped inside first, and Ivy followed, and the door shut behind them, and the latch clicked, and the storm raged on outside, indifferent to all of it.
The great room was quiet when they walked in. The fire had burned low, its embers glowing dim orange behind the grate. Someone had draped additional blankets over the remaining empty armchair. Mary slipped past Ivy without a backward glance and crossed to where her own things had been left, keeping her hands busy, keeping her eyes down.
Ivy scanned the room instead, counting faces without meaning to, trying to work out who had been missing long enough to have stepped outside and back in. No one looked back at her. No one looked out of breath, or cold, or freshly returned from the porch. Whoever it had been, they'd already folded themselves back into the room, indistinguishable from everyone else.
Ivy crossed to the opposite side of the room and sat on the sagging couch, pulling her knees to her chest, staring at the fire without really seeing it. Across the room, Mary had settled into the armchair, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, her face pale in the firelight.
They didn't look at each other.
The great room was quiet.
Ivy let her gaze drift over the group without seeming to, the same careful counting instinct she could never fully switch off. Gabriel sprawled across the far end of the couch, whiskey bottle balanced against his knee, already half-drowsing despite the tension in the room. Chester sat near the fire, feeding it another log with the same unreadable patience he'd shown all night, though Ivy noticed, now that she was looking for it, a faint dampness at the cuffs of his sleeves—melted snow, or something that had once been snow.
Carol was at the window, arms crossed, staring out at nothing. Her hair, too, looked faintly disturbed, a few loose strands escaping the neat twist she'd worn all evening. Joseph sat rigid in one of the dining chairs someone had dragged closer to the fire, his hands folded so tightly together his knuckles had gone pale, and he wasn't looking at anyone.
Any one of them could have been the shape in the doorway. Any one of them could have seen.
Star, at least, was easy to rule out—still curled on the floor with her phone angled toward the tree, oblivious, narrating something under her breath for whatever audience she imagined was still watching this deep into a blizzard. Noah sat beside her, arms draped loosely over his knees, watching the fire with the same tired patience as Chester. Angel had curled into the corner of the loveseat, her sketchbook open but untouched in her lap, her pencil still.
David had an arm around Holly, who leaned into him, humming faintly under her breath—a tune Ivy didn't recognize, something slow and old-fashioned, out of place against the storm outside. Grace moved between them all with a stack of mismatched mugs, refilling cocoa no one had asked for, the same restless energy she always fell into when she needed her hands to be doing something other than sitting still.
Noelle was the only one missing from Ivy's slow circuit of the room.
The realization landed heavy and sudden, and Ivy's stomach dropped before her mind had even finished the thought. She scanned the room again, more carefully this time, half expecting to have simply overlooked her curled somewhere in shadow. But the armchair by the window was empty. The spot she'd claimed by the fire earlier in the evening sat vacant, a single dented mug abandoned on the side table beside it, gone cold.
Ivy's eyes found Mary across the room. Mary had gone rigid in the armchair, her gaze fixed on that same empty spot, her face drained of whatever color the cold hadn't already taken. She'd seen it too. She'd done the same count, arrived at the same absence, and reached, unmistakably, the same terrible conclusion.
Neither of them said her name. Neither of them dared to be the one who asked, out loud, in front of everyone, where Noelle had gone—not yet, not with the memory of that porch still fresh enough to taste, not with the shape in the doorway still unaccounted for.
But outside, the snow kept falling, and somewhere in the house, footsteps that didn't belong to either of them had already vanished into the dark.
The floorboards above them creaked.
Noelle leaned into Mary’s space, close enough that her breath tickled Mary’s ear. “Hey,” she said, her voice barely above a murmur. “You alone?”
Mary’s heart stuttered. She turned her head, and Noelle’s face was so close she could see the flecks of gold in her eyes, the tiny scar above her eyebrow she’d gotten as a kid in school. “What do you think?”
Noelle’s grin curved, slow and knowing. “I think I’m going to slip out for some air. And if someone happened to come with me...” She shrugged, standing, already beginning to drift toward the hallway that led to the back door. “I wouldn’t complain about the company.”
Mary’s mouth went dry. She glanced around the room, Grace in the kitchen, Ivy by the fire, everyone absorbed in the swell of conversation. She knew she shouldn’t. She knew it was risky. She knew there were a dozen reasons why this was a terrible idea, and all of them had names that she loved.
She stood up anyway.
She threaded through the crowd, casual and unhurried, grabbing her coat from the hook by the door as if she were just going out for air. No one seemed to notice. Ivy was too absorbed in the fire. Grace was too absorbed in the world she was leaving behind.
The back door closed behind her with a soft click.
The cold hit her like a slap. She sucked in a sharp breath, the air freezing in her lungs, and for a moment she could only stand on the small wooden deck, waiting for her eyes to adjust. The moon was half-full, hidden behind a veil of clouds, casting the clearing in a dim, milky light that turned the trees into soft-focus silhouettes.
Her eyes adjusted. The clearing was a small circle of open ground behind the cottage, ringed by a treeline that stood taller and darker than the woods in front. Snow covered everything, pristine and utterly unblemished. No tracks. No trails. No footprints.
Noelle was already there, leaning against a tree at the edge of the clearing. She’d pulled her jacket on without zipping it, the collar turned up against the cold, and she was smoking a cigarette. The tip glowed orange in the dimness, briefly illuminating her face.
“You smoke?” Mary asked, stepping into the clearing. Her boots crunched on the fresh snow.
Noelle shrugged, lifting the cigarette to her lips. “Only when I’m stressed.” She took a drag, held it, let the smoke curl from her mouth in a long, slow stream. “And this place is stressing me the fuck out.”
Mary moved closer. The snow was deep enough that she had to push through it, each step an effort. She stopped a few feet from Noelle, close enough to feel the chill radiating off her in waves. “What’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” Noelle laughed, but it was hollow. “Mary, the fire was lit when we got here. The stockings were hung. All twelve of them, with our names on them.” She took another drag, her eyes fixed on the treeline. “And someone was singing upstairs. In a room with no lights and no windows open and no goddamn reason to be occupied.”
“Maybe it was one of the others messing around,” Mary offered, but even she could hear how weak that sounded.
“I heard it. Ivy heard it.” Noelle dropped the cigarette, crushed it under her boot. “It wasn’t one of us.”
Mary moved closer. She reached out and took Noelle’s hand, the one that had been so close to her thigh on the couch. Noelle’s fingers were cold, colder than the air, and Mary wrapped both her hands around them, trying to thaw them. “Hey. We’re all here now. Twelve of us. Whatever’s going on, we’ll figure it out.”
Noelle looked at her. Her face was half-hidden in shadow, but Mary could see the fear in her eyes, the crack in the golden, laughing facade she wore like armor. “You believe in ghosts?”
“No.”
“Me neither.” Noelle’s laugh was shorter this time, sharper. “But I believe in something.”
The silence stretched between them. The trees seemed to lean in, closer than they had been a moment before. Snow began to fall again, soft and silent, catching in Noelle’s hair and glinting there like tiny stars.
Mary stepped forward. She moved into the space between them, her body close enough to Noelle that she could feel the girl’s warmth, the subtle tremble in her frame. She reached up slowly, giving Noelle time to pull away, but Noelle didn’t move. She just watched her with those unreadable eyes, the gold in them flickering like candlelight.
“Oh,” Noelle said softly. “So that’s how it’s going to be?”
“It’s how it has to be,” Mary whispered, and then she closed the distance.
The kiss lingered, unhurried despite the cold pressing in around them. Noelle’s hands found the front of Mary’s coat, gripping the fabric, and Mary let herself lean into it, into the warmth of another body after a night that had felt so wrong in every other way.
“How long?” Noelle breathed, pulling back just enough to speak. “How long are we going to hide this?”
“Does it matter?” Mary’s face was flushed, her breath uneven. “Ivy and Grace.”
“Fuck Ivy and Grace.” Noelle’s hands slid down to rest at Mary’s waist. “Fuck everyone who isn’t out here right now.”
“Someone could see.”
“Nobody’s watching.” Noelle leaned her forehead against Mary’s, voice dropping to barely a whisper. “Just us and the trees. And the trees don’t care, Mary.”
Mary closed her eyes and let herself have this, just for a minute. The cold at her back, the warmth in front of her, the guilt she’d deal with later because she always did. She thought of the night at Noah’s party, the bathroom stall, the bottle of cheap vodka between them, the first time this had started, and pushed the rest of the thoughts away. She didn’t want to think about Ivy’s trusting green eyes across the fire. Not tonight.
They stayed like that for a while, foreheads together, breath mingling in the cold, the confession of guilt and want tangled together in the quiet the way it always was between them.
“Holy shit,” Noelle finally said, voice softer now, almost sad. “You’d never guess it, looking at you. All pretty and proper for Ivy. And here you are.”
Mary’s face flushed, but she didn’t pull away. “Don’t. Don’t talk about her.”
“I’m not judging.” Noelle’s hand found hers again, squeezing once. “I just don’t get how you carry it. The two of us. Her not knowing.”
The cross at Mary’s collarbone felt suddenly heavy, a small, sharp reminder of everything she was betraying. “I don’t carry it well,” she admitted, voice barely audible. “I just don’t stop.”
Noelle was quiet for a moment. Then, gently: “Do you want to stop?”
Mary didn’t answer right away. The snow kept falling, hushing everything around them.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I feel so guilty.”
“I know.”
“I love Ivy. I do. I.”
“I know.” Noelle’s voice was gentle, softer than Mary had ever heard her. “I know you do. And I’m not going to tell her. We okay?”
Mary nodded. Her breath shuddered out of her. “Okay. Okay.”
They stood there for another moment, not quite looking at each other, the weight of what they’d admitted settling between them like a fallen branch. A log split in the fireplace inside, but the sound didn’t reach them through the walls.
“We should go inside,” Noelle said finally. “Before someone comes looking.”
Mary nodded. She didn’t want to go inside. She wanted to stay in the cold, in the dark, in the space where she didn’t have to pretend to be someone she wasn’t. But she couldn’t stay out here all night. They’d notice.
They walked back to the cottage together, steps careful on the snow, and Mary looked over her shoulder at the treeline before they reached the door. No movement. No dark shape between the pines. Just trees and shadow and falling snow.
Several days later, The kitchen door clicked shut behind them, and the sound was swallowed whole by the storm. The porch light flickered overhead, buzzing faintly, casting a sickly yellow glow that barely reached past the railing. Beyond that, the world had gone white and shapeless, the treeline erased, the sky erased, everything erased except the snow falling in thick, relentless curtains.
Mary's arms were wrapped around herself, her breath coming in short, uneven bursts. She still wouldn't look at Ivy. Her eyes were fixed on some point in the middle distance, on the nothing that waited past the porch, and her jaw was set so tight Ivy could see the muscle jumping beneath her skin.
Ivy stood three feet away. The distance felt like a canyon.
"You're going to freeze to death out here," she said.
"I told you. I don't care."
"Then care about something else." Ivy's voice was sharper than she intended, and she saw Mary flinch. She softened, just slightly. "You can be angry with me. You can hate me. But don't stand out here and let yourself get hypothermia because you don't want to be in the same room as me."
Mary finally turned. Her eyes were wet, though whether from the cold or something else, Ivy couldn't tell. The tears hadn't fallen yet, but they were there, pooling at the corners, catching the weak porch light like something liquid and alive.
"I don't hate you," Mary said. The words came out cracked, thin. "That's the problem."
The wind shifted. It came around the corner of the cottage, cutting across the porch like a blade, and Mary shivered so hard her teeth chattered. Ivy watched her, watched the way her arms tightened around herself, the way she seemed to curl inward against the cold, and something in her chest twisted painfully.
She stepped forward.
One step. Then another. The distance between them shrank, foot by foot, until Ivy was close enough to feel the cold radiating off Mary's coat, close enough to see the individual flakes of snow caught in her dark hair.
"You're lying to me," Ivy said quietly. "I know you're lying to me about something. I don't know what, and I don't know why, but I can feel it. It's been there for weeks, and it's getting worse."
Mary's breath hitched. She looked away again, but this time Ivy reached out and caught her chin, turning her face back, forcing her to meet her eyes.
"I'm not going to push you," Ivy said. "I'm not going to demand answers you're not ready to give. But I need you to know that whatever it is, whatever you're hiding, it's eating you alive. I can see it. And I'm scared, Mary. I'm scared for you."
The tears finally fell.
Mary made a sound, something between a sob and a gasp, and then she was moving, closing the last few inches between them, her hands coming up to grip the front of Ivy's jacket. She pulled her close, and Ivy let herself be pulled, and for a moment they just stood there, foreheads touching, breath mingling in the cold air, saying nothing at all.
Then Mary kissed her.
It wasn't hesitant. Whatever had been building for weeks—the stolen glances, the silences that lasted a beat too long, the way they'd both learned to stand just slightly out of each other's reach—broke all at once, and Mary kissed her like she'd been holding her breath for months and had finally been allowed to breathe. Ivy made a small, startled sound against her mouth before she kissed her back, one hand rising to cup Mary's jaw, the other fisting in the front of her coat to pull her closer still.
The cold disappeared. The wind, the snow, the porch rail digging into Ivy's back—none of it mattered. There was only the warmth of Mary's mouth against hers, insistent and searching, and the soft, broken noise Mary made when Ivy kissed her back just as fiercely. Mary's fingers slid up into Ivy's hair, snow-damp and cold, and she tilted her head to deepen the kiss, and Ivy let her, let herself be kissed like that—hungrily, desperately, like an apology and a confession all at once.
"I've wanted to tell you," Mary breathed against her lips, barely pulling back far enough to speak. "For weeks. I've wanted to. I just don't know how."
"Then don't tell me tonight," Ivy murmured. "Just—" She kissed her again before she could finish the sentence, softer this time, but no less certain. "Just stay here. That's enough for now."
Mary let out a shuddering breath that dissolved into another kiss, her hands framing Ivy's face like she was trying to memorize it by touch. When they finally broke apart, both of them were breathing hard, foreheads pressed together, and Mary let out a small, disbelieving laugh, as though she couldn't quite believe she'd allowed herself this.
"I've thought about that for so long," she admitted quietly.
"Me too," Ivy said. "God, me too."
Mary rested her head against Ivy's shoulder, and Ivy wrapped both arms around her, and they stayed like that, swaying slightly, the wind pulling at their coats, the snow gathering in their hair and along the collars of their jackets. Neither of them moved to go back inside. Neither of them wanted to be the first to let go.
"I keep thinking about the first night we met," Mary said after a while, her voice muffled against Ivy's shoulder. "You were so sure of everything. I remember thinking, *God, I want to be like that. I want to be someone who just says what she means.*"
Ivy huffed out something like a laugh. "I'm not sure of anything. I just don't let people see the part where I'm not."
"That's worse, somehow."
"Is it?"
"It means you've been scared this whole time too. I just didn't know it." Mary pulled back far enough to look at her, snow catching in her lashes, her cheeks pink from cold. "I always thought you had it figured out. That I was the mess and you were just—patient with me. Like I was something you were managing."
"You were never something I was managing." Ivy's voice cracked slightly on the word *never*, and she hated how much it gave away. "I don't know how to explain what you are to me without it sounding bigger than either of us can hold right now. So I didn't try. I just stood next to you and hoped you'd figure it out on your own."
"I did figure it out." Mary's laugh was watery. "I just didn't know what to do with it. Noelle and I—" She stopped herself.
"You don't have to talk about her."
"I want to. I think I need to, actually, before I lose my nerve." Mary took a breath, steadying herself. "It's not that I don't care about her. I do. That's what makes it so awful. It would be so much easier if I didn't. But caring about her and wanting you were never the same feeling, even when I tried to convince myself they could be."
Ivy said nothing. She simply reached up and brushed a strand of damp hair from Mary's face, tucking it gently behind her ear, and the tenderness of the gesture seemed to undo something in Mary all over again.
"I'm not asking you to choose anything tonight," Ivy said finally. "I don't want you making decisions standing outside in a blizzard because you're scared and cold and I kissed you. I want you to be sure. For you. Not for me."
"I am sure." Mary's voice firmed, even as her hands trembled faintly where they rested against Ivy's chest. "That's the part that terrifies me. I've spent months telling myself I wasn't. It was so much easier to believe I was confused."
"And now?"
"Now I don't think I've been confused about anything in my entire life the way I'm confused about how to fix what I've done to everyone by finally admitting it."
The wind gusted hard enough to rattle the porch rail, and Mary flinched, curling instinctively closer to Ivy's side. Ivy tightened her arms around her without thinking, some old, automatic instinct to shield her from the cold—and from everything else that was coming, though she couldn't have said that part out loud even if she'd tried.
For a while neither of them spoke. The porch light buzzed and dimmed and steadied again. Somewhere beyond the railing, the storm had thickened into something almost solid, a wall of white that swallowed the yard whole, the treeline, the fence, the shed where Grace claimed to have gotten lost earlier that evening. Ivy found herself staring into it without meaning to, some old, wary part of her cataloguing the dark the way she catalogued everything—out of habit, out of the need to know where every exit was before she let herself feel safe anywhere.
"You're doing it again," Mary murmured against her collarbone.
"Doing what?"
"Counting things. I can feel you doing it. Your whole body goes still and careful."
"Old habit."
"One of these days you're going to have to tell me where it comes from."
"One of these days," Ivy agreed, and left it at that, because some truths took longer to give away than others, and this one wasn't leaving her mouth tonight, not with Mary's confession still hanging warm and fragile in the air between them.
Mary shifted against her, tucking herself more fully into the curve of Ivy's body, as if trying to disappear into the warmth of her, into the moment itself, before the world could reach in and take it back. "Can I ask you something?"
"Always."
"When did you know? About me. About—this." Mary gestured vaguely between them, a small, helpless motion.
Ivy considered the question honestly, turning it over before she answered, because Mary deserved better than a glib reply. "The night of the bonfire. Back in October. You were telling that story about your grandmother's garden, the one with the crooked fence, and you laughed at your own joke before anyone else even understood what was funny." She shook her head slightly, remembering. "I just remember thinking I wanted to hear you laugh like that for the rest of my life. It scared the hell out of me."
"I don't remember telling that story."
"You wouldn't. You'd had three glasses of Gabriel's terrible wine by then."
Mary laughed—a real one this time, bright and surprised, cutting through the heaviness that had settled over the porch. It faded quickly, but for a moment it had been there, unguarded, and Ivy held onto the sound of it like something she could keep.
"I wish it could always be that easy," Mary said. "Just—laughing. Not all of this. Not the sneaking around, the lying, the way I flinch every time Noelle looks at me like she already knows."
"Does she know?"
Mary's jaw tightened. "I don't know what she knows. I don't know what anyone knows anymore. That's the exhausting part—trying to remember which version of myself I've shown to which person. It's like I've been performing for so long I've forgotten what's actually true underneath it."
"This is true," Ivy said, gesturing between them, echoing Mary's own gesture back at her. "Whatever else is a mess, this part isn't."
"I want to believe that."
"Then believe it. Just for tonight. We can be terrified again tomorrow."
Mary huffed out something between a laugh and a sob, and pressed her face into Ivy's shoulder again, breathing her in like she was trying to memorize this too, the smell of her coat, the cold air, the low hum of the storm around them. Ivy held her through it, one hand moving in slow circles against her back, and for a while neither of them spoke, content to simply exist in the small, fragile pocket of peace they'd carved out for themselves on a freezing porch in the middle of a blizzard.
"I don't deserve you being this patient with me," Mary murmured.
"You don't have to deserve it. That's not how it works."
Mary laughed, short and wet, half a sob. "You always say things like that. Like it's simple."
"It is simple. You're just used to things being complicated."
Mary pulled back enough to look at her, and something passed between them—old, tired, and tender all at once. She reached up and brushed a fleck of snow from Ivy's cheek, her fingers cold, her touch careful.
"I love you," Mary said. The words came out plain, almost startled, as though she hadn't meant to say them yet.
Ivy went very still.
"I know," she said finally, quietly. "I love you too."
For a moment, neither of them said anything else. The porch light buzzed. The snow fell. It should have felt like relief, saying it out loud after weeks of silence, but there was something underneath it, some current of dread that neither of them could name, and it kept them from smiling, kept the moment from settling into anything easy.
Ivy was about to say something else—she wasn't sure what, only that she needed to fill the silence before it swallowed them both—when the door at the far end of the porch creaked open.
Both of them turned at once.
A figure stood framed in the doorway, backlit by the warm light of the kitchen, features lost to shadow. For a long second, no one moved. No one spoke. The wind seemed to pause with them, as though even the storm were waiting to see what would happen next.
Ivy's mind raced through possibilities even as her body stayed frozen—the height was wrong for Gabriel, too slight for Chester, and whoever it was hadn't called out, hadn't laughed, hadn't done any of the things a person might do upon stumbling onto something private and unexpected. They had simply stood there. Watching. Silent.
Then the figure stepped back, fast, almost stumbling in their hurry, and the door swung shut with a soft, decisive click. Footsteps retreated across the kitchen floor, quick and uneven, fading toward the great room.
"Was that—" Mary started.
"I don't know." Ivy's heart was hammering. She wiped at her eyes quickly, as though that alone could erase what had just happened. "I couldn't tell who it was."
"Do you think they heard us? Saw us?"
"I don't know," Ivy said again, and this time her voice cracked around the words. "Maybe. Probably."
Mary wrapped her arms around herself once more, the warmth of a moment ago already draining out of her. "Great. That's just—that's perfect."
"It doesn't matter right now," Ivy said, though she didn't entirely believe it. "Whoever it was, they're gone. We should go back in before someone starts asking where we've been."
Mary nodded, but she didn't move right away. She stared at the door for a long moment, as if she could still see the shape of whoever had stood there, watching them, before vanishing back into the house. Her hands were shaking, and it wasn't entirely from the cold.
"What if they tell someone?" Mary asked quietly. "What if it gets back to her before I've even figured out how to say it myself?"
"Then we deal with that when it happens. We don't have to have every answer tonight." Ivy reached out and took Mary's hand, lacing their fingers together, grounding her. "One thing at a time. Right now, we just need to walk back inside and act normal, whatever normal even looks like after everything that's happened tonight."
"Normal." Mary let out a short, humorless laugh. "I don't remember what that word means anymore."
"Neither do I. We'll fake it together."
That, at least, drew a small, tired smile from Mary, the first real one since they'd stepped outside. She squeezed Ivy's hand once, hard, and then let go, smoothing down the front of her coat, composing herself the way Ivy imagined she must have learned to do a hundred times before, in a hundred other rooms, with a hundred other secrets tucked carefully out of sight.
"Ivy." Her voice was smaller now. "What if it was her?"
Ivy didn't have to ask who she meant. The question sat between them, unanswered, and neither of them wanted to be the one to say it out loud.
"We'll find out," Ivy said. "Come on. Let's go inside before we freeze."
They crossed the porch together, snow crunching beneath their boots, and Ivy pulled the door open. The warmth of the cottage rushed out to meet them, and for a moment neither of them moved to step through it, as though crossing that threshold would make everything that had just happened irreversibly real.
Then Mary stepped inside first, and Ivy followed, and the door shut behind them, and the latch clicked, and the storm raged on outside, indifferent to all of it.
The great room was quiet when they walked in. The fire had burned low, its embers glowing dim orange behind the grate. Someone had draped additional blankets over the remaining empty armchair. Mary slipped past Ivy without a backward glance and crossed to where her own things had been left, keeping her hands busy, keeping her eyes down.
Ivy scanned the room instead, counting faces without meaning to, trying to work out who had been missing long enough to have stepped outside and back in. No one looked back at her. No one looked out of breath, or cold, or freshly returned from the porch. Whoever it had been, they'd already folded themselves back into the room, indistinguishable from everyone else.
Ivy crossed to the opposite side of the room and sat on the sagging couch, pulling her knees to her chest, staring at the fire without really seeing it. Across the room, Mary had settled into the armchair, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, her face pale in the firelight.
They didn't look at each other.
The great room was quiet.
Ivy let her gaze drift over the group without seeming to, the same careful counting instinct she could never fully switch off. Gabriel sprawled across the far end of the couch, whiskey bottle balanced against his knee, already half-drowsing despite the tension in the room. Chester sat near the fire, feeding it another log with the same unreadable patience he'd shown all night, though Ivy noticed, now that she was looking for it, a faint dampness at the cuffs of his sleeves—melted snow, or something that had once been snow.
Carol was at the window, arms crossed, staring out at nothing. Her hair, too, looked faintly disturbed, a few loose strands escaping the neat twist she'd worn all evening. Joseph sat rigid in one of the dining chairs someone had dragged closer to the fire, his hands folded so tightly together his knuckles had gone pale, and he wasn't looking at anyone.
Any one of them could have been the shape in the doorway. Any one of them could have seen.
Star, at least, was easy to rule out—still curled on the floor with her phone angled toward the tree, oblivious, narrating something under her breath for whatever audience she imagined was still watching this deep into a blizzard. Noah sat beside her, arms draped loosely over his knees, watching the fire with the same tired patience as Chester. Angel had curled into the corner of the loveseat, her sketchbook open but untouched in her lap, her pencil still.
David had an arm around Holly, who leaned into him, humming faintly under her breath—a tune Ivy didn't recognize, something slow and old-fashioned, out of place against the storm outside. Grace moved between them all with a stack of mismatched mugs, refilling cocoa no one had asked for, the same restless energy she always fell into when she needed her hands to be doing something other than sitting still.
Noelle was the only one missing from Ivy's slow circuit of the room.
The realization landed heavy and sudden, and Ivy's stomach dropped before her mind had even finished the thought. She scanned the room again, more carefully this time, half expecting to have simply overlooked her curled somewhere in shadow. But the armchair by the window was empty. The spot she'd claimed by the fire earlier in the evening sat vacant, a single dented mug abandoned on the side table beside it, gone cold.
Ivy's eyes found Mary across the room. Mary had gone rigid in the armchair, her gaze fixed on that same empty spot, her face drained of whatever color the cold hadn't already taken. She'd seen it too. She'd done the same count, arrived at the same absence, and reached, unmistakably, the same terrible conclusion.
Neither of them said her name. Neither of them dared to be the one who asked, out loud, in front of everyone, where Noelle had gone—not yet, not with the memory of that porch still fresh enough to taste, not with the shape in the doorway still unaccounted for.
But outside, the snow kept falling, and somewhere in the house, footsteps that didn't belong to either of them had already vanished into the dark.
The floorboards above them creaked.
The great room had settled into a kind of uneasy quiet, the way a room does when everyone inside it is pretending not to listen for something. The fire had been fed twice more, and the flames had risen high enough to paint the ceiling in shifting bands of orange and black, but no one seemed to take any comfort from it. The heat rolled off the hearth in waves, and still people sat with their arms crossed, or their hands tucked into their sleeves, or their shoulders drawn up around their ears like they could somehow block out the cold that had seeped into the walls.
Grace moved through it all with the practiced efficiency of someone who had spent years being the one who kept things running. She pulled a deck of cards from the sideboard, the box soft at the corners, the cellophane long gone. No one had asked her to. No one had to. She set it down on the coffee table with a soft thump and looked around the room.
"Anyone want to play something?" she asked. Her voice was steady, but there was a thin edge underneath it, a barely perceptible strain that only someone listening closely would have caught. "We've got cards. Poker, rummy, gin. Whatever."
No one answered right away.
Gabriel was sprawled in the armchair closest to the fire, the whiskey bottle now mostly empty and dangling from two fingers. His face was flushed, his eyes glassy, and he had the look of a man who was actively working to stay upright. "Poker," he said, slurring slightly. "Let's play poker. I'm feeling lucky."
"You're feeling drunk," Carol said from the window. She hadn't moved in twenty minutes. Her arms were crossed, and her reflection stared back at her from the dark glass, pale and hollow-eyed.
"Same thing," Gabriel said, and laughed. The laugh came out too loud, too sharp, and it bounced off the walls in a way that made everyone flinch.
No one else volunteered.
Grace shuffled the cards. The sound was crisp and rhythmic, a small, ordinary noise in the middle of a night that had stopped feeling ordinary hours ago. She dealt them out without waiting for anyone to agree, sliding cards across the coffee table in neat little piles.
"Texas hold 'em," she said. "Low stakes. We're not playing for money."
"We could play for chores," David suggested from the couch. He was sitting with Holly tucked against his side, her head resting on his shoulder, her eyes half-closed. The presents lay scattered around them, torn paper and crushed bows and the faint smell of tape and ink. "Loser has to dig out the driveway when the storm stops."
"The storm's not stopping for days," Chester said. He was crouched by the hearth, poking at the fire with the iron rod, his movements slow and deliberate. He hadn't looked up from the flames in a long time. "Could be a week."
"Then loser has to dig out the driveway when the storm stops in a week," David said. "Sounds like a good deal to me."
"I'll play," Noah said. He was curled in one of the deer-antler chairs, his knees pulled up to his chest, his jacket zipper pulled all the way to his chin. The little bells on it jingled softly every time he shifted, a small, nervous sound that had become something like a tic over the past few hours. "I'm not very good, though."
"None of us are," Grace said. "That's the point."
Star was on the floor near the tree, her phone propped up against a stack of discarded wrapping paper, the camera angled toward the room. She had been filming intermittently all night, short clips, mostly of the tree, the fire, the presents. She hadn't posted anything yet. The signal was gone, and she had no way of knowing when it would come back. She kept filming anyway, a habit she couldn't break, a way of pretending the night was something she could edit down later into something that made sense.
"Are you getting this?" Noah asked her, gesturing vaguely at the room.
"Yeah," Star said. "For posterity."
"What's posterity?"
"I don't know. Something my mom used to say."
Noah nodded and didn't ask anything else.
Across the room, Angel sat in the corner of the loveseat, her sketchbook open in her lap. She wasn't drawing. She was holding something small in her fingers, turning it over and over, the silver crescent moon necklace Holly had given her earlier. The chain glinted in the firelight. Her face was blank, but her eyes were dark and distant, focused on something no one else could see.
Joseph sat in the dining chair he'd dragged close to the fire earlier in the evening, his hands folded tightly in his lap. He hadn't moved in a long time. His eyes kept drifting upward, toward the ceiling, toward the sound of the floorboards creaking overhead. No one else seemed to notice. No one else seemed to be listening.
The first hand was dealt. Cards slid across the table, faces hidden, edges worn soft from years of use. Everyone picked up their hands and looked at them, and for a moment, the room felt almost normal. Almost like any other night, in any other cabin, with any other group of friends.
Then Gabriel laughed again.
It was too loud. Too sudden. It cut through the quiet like a knife, and everyone looked up at once, startled, tense.
"What?" Gabriel said, spreading his hands. "I got a good hand. Sue me."
"You don't even know what you have," Carol said. Her voice was flat. "You're too drunk to read the cards."
"I can read them fine. See, I've got a king. And a. A four. And another one of these."
"That's a seven."
"So it is." Gabriel grinned, wide and sloppy. "I'm still winning."
"You're not winning," David said. "We haven't even bet yet."
"Then bet. I've got plenty."
No one laughed. The joke fell flat, and Gabriel's grin faded, and he looked down at his cards with something like confusion, like he'd forgotten where he was and what he was doing and why everyone was staring at him.
The silence stretched.
It was broken by another sound, faint and distant, coming from somewhere above them. A creak. A footstep. A slow, deliberate shift of weight across old floorboards.
Everyone heard it this time.
Chester stood up, the iron rod still in his hand, the tip smeared with soot and ash. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, on the dark mouth of the staircase that led up into shadow. He didn't speak. He just stood there, waiting.
"What was that?" Noah whispered. "What was that? What was that?"
"It's the house settling," Grace said. But her voice was thin, and her hands had stopped shuffling the cards. "Old houses make noise. We've been over this."
"That wasn't settling," Angel said. Her voice was quiet, but it carried. "That was footsteps. Someone's upstairs."
The fire popped. A log shifted, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney, and everyone jumped. The sound was too loud, too sudden, and it rang in the silence like a gunshot.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.