Page 15 of Out of the Cold

Then she remembered the hot tub.

In her room she undressed and put on her robe, then twisted her hair into a bun on top of her head. She stepped out onto the deck and looked around, relieved to see high privacy walls, as well as a partition on the side facing the deck’s glass doors. Straight ahead, she had a view of the trees.

It was a huge deck, with plenty of room to accommodate a big family, but the only furniture out there now was a bench and a couple of chairs near the tub. There was a gate at the top of the stairs, so she let Hilde out, then lay her towel and robe over a chair and lifted the tub’s lid, releasing billows of steam.

This was going to be good. Stepping in carefully, she sank into the water with a moan.

Her eyes closed, and her whole body relaxed for the first time in months.

Sometime later, the slam of a car door brought her out of her reverie. She tensed, wondering if someone was at the house. But no, it was most likely Gabriel, heading out.

Her fingers were pruned, and it was probably time to check the woodstove.

There was only one half-burned log left when she and Hilde went back inside, but she was in plenty of time. Slipping on Gabriel’s gloves, she fed half a dozen logs into the fire. No doubt the task would soon be so mundane as to not even register on her brain, but at present, she was thrilled to have both remembered and performed the task well. Or she thought she had. Time would tell.

She’d been here twenty-four hours, and she was marginally more knowledgeable than yesterday. She could keep herself from freezing to death in the cabin, and that was something.

Now it was time to feed herself.

She’d bought the ingredients for her mom’s chicken soup, the homiest thing she could think of. The one good thing about living at home for so long was learning how to cook. Even when she was too tired and weak to actually do any chopping or stirring, she’d sit at the table and her mother would narrate what she was doing and why. On the nights her dad cooked, she made him do it, too. He liked to ham it up and pretend he was on a cooking show, though he sometimes lost track of where he was in the recipe.

She smiled at the memory, a wave of homesickness washing over her.

She needed to stop thinking about all the things she liked about living at home and remember how stifling her family’s overprotection had been. Moving away had been liberating, and this was another step in that direction.

She wrote some letters while the soup simmered on the stove, then served herself a bowl along with a glass of white wine. It was damn good, and very satisfying, but she couldn’t help wishing she was sharing it with someone.

Too bad Gabriel was such a lost cause. Having a dinner companion from time to time would have been nice. But if she couldn’t share a meal with someone in person, she could at least call her best friend.

Cara answered on the first ring. “Oh my God, finally! How are you?”

It was a simple question, but not so simple to answer. “I’m okay. It’s not what I was expecting, but I haven’t burned down the cabin, so I guess I’m ahead.”

“You don’t sound too happy.”

“I’m a little jittery. It’s hard to breathe up here, which is really unnerving, and then I heard a mountain lion last night. It woke me out of a sound sleep, and I thought someone was being murdered.”

“That sounds awful.”

“It wasn’t the best first night. I’m in the middle of nowhere, and the caretaker wishes I would disappear.”

“That can’t be right. Everyone loves you.”

“I guess he didn’t get the memo. On the plus side, there’s a hot tub.”

“I could put up with a lot if I had a hot tub.”

“It’s definitely an unexpected perk.” She wandered to the sliding glass doors and looked out at the swaying treetops. “To be honest, I’m pretty homesick. I keep thinking how easy it would be to go back.”

“Your family would be thrilled, but do you think you’d be happy? You wanted to get away for so long.”

“I know. I suppose I shouldn’t go home just because I’m having a bad day.”

“Give it a chance. Maybe the mountains will grow on you. Speaking of which, is the caretaker hot?”

Lucy laughed. “The man can’t stand me!”

“I’m just asking.”

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