Dawn came fully gray. The storm had finally spent itself against the Green Mountains and wandered off to bother some other county. Distant plow trucks muttered like large animals clearing their throats. Peter woke stiff and righteous, hair somehow still neat, which Claire found personally irritating. She met him at the door in her mustard suede coat—not to leave with him, but to walk him to the edge of the lot where a county truck had begun to scrape a path through the drifts with noisy civic virtue.
"I'm staying another day," she said. Her breath made clouds. His made thinner ones. "Maybe more. Tell my mother I'm safe. Tell her I'll open her lawyer letter when I'm ready to read what she paid someone else to say. And Peter—don't drive up after me again. Care should feel like care, not retrieval. You were good at schedules. Be good at letting go."
He looked as if he might argue, the old reflex twitching in his jaw. Then he looked past her at the diner windows, where Jack and Mae stood framed in warm light like a painting titled What You're Not, and seemed to understand that some arguments had already lost on points of weather and gravy and time. He nodded once, cold and defeated and still handsome in the way of closed doors. "Goodbye, Claire. Try not to romanticize diners too hard. They close."
"So do calendars," Claire said. "Goodbye, Peter."