She won two games. He won three. The sixth they abandoned when the radio crackled with the first useful news of the day: plows moving on the lower road, patrol teams checking the mid-mountain trails for stragglers and fools, estimated clearance to Silverton by mid-afternoon if the wind did not start its argument again. Ray relayed the information and then went back outside to check the roof load, knocking down a cornice of snow with a long pole before it could decide to come down on its own terms. Ellen watched him through the clear patch of window—red parka, white cross, salt-and-pepper hair dark with snowmelt, the grey wool sweater visible at the wrists when he raised his arms—and felt the complication arrive exactly on time, the way plot complications always did when you had been avoiding them by playing cards with incomplete decks.
The complication was not the storm. The storm was weather, and weather ended. The complication was that she did not want to leave, and leaving was what her life was built to do—suitcases, deadlines, the next place always already half-written in a notebook. And the further complication, quieter and more dangerous, was that Ray Callahan had looked at her this morning as if she were not a rescue but a person, and she had looked back the same way, and neither of them had practiced that look in years without flinching from what it might require.
When he came back in, stomping snow from his boots in the practiced rhythm of a man who respected floors, she said, "I have a flight the day after Christmas. Denver to New York with a connection that looks cruel on paper. Marcus booked it. He said the seat was a Christmas gift. He has a sense of humor like a red pen."