Rowan Ashford's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Rowan folded the napkin into her palm and checked the sky. The clouds had dropped low over the roofs since morning. The radio in the coffee shop said the blizzard would hit before dark. Dinner was at six. The stranger's address sat four doors down on a street she did not know, and the wind was already lifting grit off the sidewalk. She had no car. The cabs would stop running once the snow closed the roads. She started walking with the bag under her arm and the wrong-size jacket inside it. The snow caught her three blocks in. It came sideways and thick, the kind that erases a street in minutes. She lost the numbers on the houses. She lost the curb. She stopped in the lee of a fence and tried to remember which way she had turned. A shape moved toward her through the white. It was him, in a proper coat now, calling her name because he had guessed she would try to walk. He took the bag from her hand and pulled her the last two blocks by the sleeve. His door opened into heat and the smell of onions and butter again. He shut it behind them and the storm went dumb against the wood. He fed her at a small table while the wind screamed. He said his name was Collin. He said he had almost died on the tundra a few weeks back and a woman had pulled him through it, and he had been trying since to say the right thing to her and had said nothing at all. He set his fork down. "I am not good at this," he said. "I know you a week. I know I want the rest of it." He put a ring on the table between them, a plain band with a bright stone. "Say no if you need to. I wanted you to see it." Rowan looked at the ring. She looked at the man who had built a net for her in an afternoon and come out into a whiteout to find her. She said yes. They married seven days later, before her father could arrive to close the season and object. Her father came anyway, and when he saw the ring on her hand he named a price for the big red house he had kept her in since childhood. Collin paid it in full by the end of the week. Rowan carried her own key through the front door for the first time. The blizzard was gone. The wrong jacket hung on a peg in the hall, still the wrong size, kept anyway. She stood in the wide entry of the house that was now theirs and understood the small thing had closed. The larger one, the man himself, she was still learning. The beaming newlyweds talke about starting a family after his sister nova has just welcomed babies leo and pisces.