Chapter 18: New Year's Fire
The morning arrived not with a bang, but with a slow, grey creep of light through the single-pane window. Hannah woke to the solid, unfamiliar warmth of another body wrapped around hers. Matt’s arm was a heavy, comforting weight across her ribs, his hand once again resting on the curve of her belly. For a disorienting second, she didn’t remember. Then it all rushed back—the starlight, the granite, the profound, shuddering silence of their joining. Her face heated against the pillow.
He stirred behind her, his breathing changing. His hand flexed, just slightly, a soft, unconscious press against her. “Morning,” he murmured, his voice thick with sleep.
“Morning.” The word felt clumsy in her mouth.
They lay there, suspended in the quiet. The cabin was cold away from the shared heat of the bed. She could hear her father already moving around in the main room, the clank of the old percolator on the stove. Reality, in the form of Paul and his strong coffee, was just a thin door away.
Matt’s lips brushed the nape of her neck, a whisper of contact. “You okay?”
She nodded, then realizing he couldn’t see it, whispered, “Yeah. Are you?”
“Mhm.” He didn’t elaborate. He just held her a moment longer, then sighed, the air warm on her skin. “We should probably… face the music. Or the coffee, at least.”
Getting dressed was a silent, awkward ballet in the tiny room. They bumped elbows, offered small, apologetic smiles. Hannah’s sweater was inside out. Matt couldn’t find his other sock. The mundane clumsiness of it was a relief, somehow. It grounded the night before in the plain light of day.
Paul was at the stove, scrambling eggs with a violent focus. He glanced over his shoulder as they emerged. “Sleep well?” he asked, his tone neutral.
“Like a rock,” Matt said, too quickly. He moved to the sink, splashing water on his face.
“The bed in there’s a back-breaker. Hope you managed.” Paul’s eyes flicked to Hannah, just for a second. She saw the knowing there, deep and weathered. He didn’t miss much. He just chose, often, not to comment.
“It was fine, Dad.” She pulled out a chair, the legs scraping loudly on the pine floor.
They ate breakfast in a bubble of ordinary conversation. The weather. The forecasted snow. The persistent drip from the kitchen tap that Paul vowed, for the tenth year, to fix. Matt asked intelligent questions about the cabin’s plumbing, which sent Paul off on a historical journey involving well-diggers and frost lines. Hannah just listened, pushing her eggs around her plate, feeling the ghost of Matt’s hands on her skin beneath her clothes.
The baby was active, a series of flutters and rolls that made her catch her breath. She instinctively pressed a hand to the spot.
“Kicking?” Matt asked, the warehouse conversation suddenly dropped.
“A little. More like… rearranging furniture.”
He watched her hand, his expression unreadable. Paul cleared his throat. “You two should get out. Take a drive. There’s that little general store in town that has the good jerky. I need a part for the generator.” He tossed a set of keys onto the table. “Take my truck. The walk’ll do me good later.”
It was a dismissal, but a kind one. An offering of space.
The road into town was a tunnel of frosted evergreens, the truck’s heater blasting stale, warm air. The silence between them now was different from the night’s—it was loaded, waiting.
“Your dad knows,” Matt said finally, both hands on the wheel.
“I know he knows.”
“Is that… a problem?”
She looked out at the passing white and green. “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like one. With him, it’s more about… endurance. If you stick around, you earn points. If you don’t…” She shrugged. “He’s not the lecture type. He’s the ‘I-told-you-so-six-months-from-now’ type.”
Matt digested this. “And what type are you?”
“The overthinking type.” She laughed, a short, brittle sound. “Last night was…”
“A lot.”
“Yeah. A good a lot. A terrifying a lot.”
He reached across the bench seat, his palm upturned. She slid her hand into his. His fingers closed around hers, warm and sure. “We don’t have to figure out the whole universe today, Hannah. We just have to get some jerky and a generator part.”
The simplicity of it was an anchor. She squeezed his hand. “Okay.”
The general store was a time capsule: wooden floors worn smooth, the air smelling of smoked meat, coffee, and kerosene. An old man behind the counter nodded at them, then went back to his newspaper. They wandered the narrow aisles, shoulders brushing. Matt found the jerky. Hannah lingered by a rack of postcards, faded images of the lake in summer.
“Look,” Matt said softly.
He was standing by a dusty display case near the back. Inside, next to pocketknives and fishing lures, was a small collection of hand-knitted baby items. Tiny hats in bright, twisted wool, little booties that looked impossibly small. One hat, a soft cream color, was patterned with little, raised knots that looked like waves.
“It’s from the local craft circle,” the old man said without looking up. “Elmira Jenkins makes ‘em. Sells a few here.”
Matt didn’t ask. He just pointed to the cream hat. “Can I get that one?”
Hannah’s breath hitched. She stood beside him, staring at the tiny thing through the glass. “You don’t have to.”
“I know.” He paid the man, taking the small paper bag. He handed it to her without ceremony, as if it were a pack of gum. “For the furniture-rearranger.”
She held the bag, the wool inside it soft and light as a promise. The emotion that rose in her was too big for the cluttered store. It felt suspiciously like hope, a feeling she’d been actively starving for months.
Back in the truck, with the part and the jerky and the hat on the seat between them, the world outside felt sharper. The sky had lowered, a uniform sheet of grey promising snow. Hannah held the little hat, running her thumb over the nubby wave-knots.
“Matt.” She took a deep breath. “When we go back. To the city. To work. What is… this?” She gestured between them, a feeble wave of her hand.
He was quiet for a long time, navigating a curve in the road. “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, his voice low. “About you, at work, lugging those boxes. About you going home to that empty apartment. It doesn’t sit right with me anymore.”
“I’ve been doing it fine,” she said, the old defensiveness rising on instinct.
“I know you have. But you shouldn’t have to.” He glanced at her. “I’m not talking about white knights and sweeping gestures. I’m talking about… logistics. I’m talking about me coming over after shift and making sure you’ve eaten something that didn’t come from a vending machine. I’m talking about maybe, if you wanted, some of my stuff finding its way into your apartment. Slowly. So it’s not a thing. It’s just… a fact.”
He was offering her a pathway, not a proclamation. A series of small, manageable steps.
“And your mom?” The question slipped out. The image of her elegant disdain was a cold splash.
His jaw tightened. “My mom loves me. She’ll have opinions. Loud ones. But she raised me to make my own choices. This is mine.” He pulled the truck over onto a wide gravel overlook, the lake sprawling steel-grey below them. He put the truck in park and turned to her. “I’m not asking for a yes forever right now. I’m asking for a yes to dinner. On Tuesday. At your place. I’ll cook.”
The baby moved then, a decisive, rolling kick. Hannah placed her hand over it, over the hat in her lap, over the new life quietly asserting itself. She looked at Matt—his earnest, open face, the slight anxiety in his eyes he was trying so hard to mask. She thought of the granite shelf, and the steady way he’d held her gaze as they fell apart together.
It wasn’t a fairy tale. It was a man in a borrowed truck, offering to make her dinner and fight with his mother. It was a tiny, woolen hat.
“Okay,” she said, the word finally feeling solid in her mouth. “Yeah. Tuesday.”
He leaned over, and he kissed her. It was a daytime kiss, soft and closed-mouthed, full of the practical promise of plans made. When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against hers. “Good,” he whispered.
The first few flakes of snow began to drift past the windshield, tentative and slow. They sat there for a minute, watching the storm begin to gently erase the world, the truck a warm, steady capsule against the growing cold. He put the truck back in drive, heading toward the cabin, toward her father, toward the unknown shape of their shared future, one Tuesday at a time.