"It melted. Metaphorically and otherwise. The last page was just white space and a note from the author about climate. I wanted to throw the manuscript into an actual crevasse."
Ray laughed—real laughter this time, short and rough, the sound of a man surprised to find the capacity still in working order—and Ellen felt the cabin shrink to the size of that sound. She adjusted the fair isle hat, which she had not taken off, and then, deciding something about comfort and vanity and the right to be seen, pulled it free. Honey-brown feathered hair fell around her shoulders in the style she had worn since the mid-seventies, feathered and a little wild from the hat and the weather. Soft bronze liner still held at the edges of her eyes despite the snow and the tears the cold had forced earlier on the ridge. Glossy nude lips, bitten a little from the pain, caught the lamplight when she smiled.
Ray looked at her the way a man looks at a sudden clearing in weather he had expected to last all season. Then he looked away, busy with the stove, rearranging wood that did not need rearranging, and she understood that he was practicing the old discipline of not wanting what the mountain might take away again. The discipline had a cost; she could see it in the set of his shoulders.