"Tell the children to sleep in the house tonight," he said. She looked up. "The main house?" "Bunkhouse won't hold heat in what's coming," he said. "The main house has the bigger stove and the walls are thicker.
The four of you can take the spare room and the kitchen floor. It's not comfortable, but it's warm." She was quiet for a moment and he could see her thinking through the logistics of it. Not the propriety, which he appreciated, but the practical reality of four people in two rooms that weren't meant for that.
"All right," she said. The storm hit at midnight and it was not the kind of storm that introduces itself gradually. It came in all the way with everything it had, like it had been saving up for exactly this. The wind drove the snow sideways and in the first hour the drifts against the north side of the barn grew to a height that would block the door by morning. By 2:00 in the morning, the temperature outside had dropped to a point where exposed skin would know it in under a minute.
Inside the house, stove worked, the walls held, the windows had been covered with extra cloth on the inside, Mara having done this in the last hour before the storm hit without anyone asking her to. And the cold that crept in around the frames was slowed enough that the stove could keep ahead of it. Barely. But enough. Caleb stayed up through the night.
He fed the stove every hour, and he listened to the house, and he went out twice into the storm to check the barn. The second trip bad enough that he came back with ice on his beard and his fingers slow and white-tipped. And he stood over the stove for 5 minutes, pressing his hands against the iron surface, and saying nothing until the feeling came back. Mara was awake when he came in from the second trip. She was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark with a candle, wrapped in a quilt, not doing anything.
Just awake. Waiting. She looked at his hands. "Sit down," she said. "I'm fine."
"Sit down," she said again in a tone that he was starting to recognize as the one that was not actually optional. He sat. She took his hands and held them between hers, which were warm from the quilt, and rubbed them in a way that was practical rather than gentle, working the blood back toward the fingers. He let her do it because the feeling was still only partially back, and because refusing would have been pointless, and because he didn't have the reserves at 3:00 in the morning during a blizzard to maintain the particular kind of distance he'd been maintaining. After a minute, the feeling was back, and he pulled his hands away and put them around the coffee cup she'd put in front of him without him seeing her do it.
"You should sleep," he said. "I wasn't sleeping anyway," she said. She sat back down across the table. In the candlelight, she looked like someone a painting might have noticed. Not pretty in any design sense, but vivid, the way people are vivid when they're fully present and not pretending to be anywhere else.
She'd been fully present every day since she arrived, and it still caught him off guard sometimes. "What happens if the storm stays for more than a week?" She said. "Then we manage." He said.