Ellen did not reach for his hand. She did not say she was sorry in the thin way people said it when they wanted the feeling to end so they could return to comfort. She sat with the information the way you sit with weather—acknowledging it, letting it change the air in the room, refusing to pretend the change was small.
"I wondered why a man rescues moose on Christmas Eve," she said at last.
"Mostly moose," he corrected, and the hint of a smile returned, fainter, a coal under ash. "And the occasional travel writer with a bad sense of timing."