A sample from
Whiteout
The lodge came up out of the pines exactly the way the brochure promised, which was the first thing Simone Adeyemi had trusted about this job in a week. Timber and river-stone, a long low silhouette against a sky the colour of a bruise going grey at the edges. Snow had started somewhere back on the switchbacks — fat, unhurried flakes that the wipers smeared into arcs — but nothing the forecast hadn't accounted for, and she had accounted for the forecast. She always accounted for the forecast. A wedding at eight thousand feet in late February was a dare she'd only taken because the bride's mother had said impossible in a certain tone, and Simone Adeyemi did not do impossible; she did itemized.
She had the walkthrough clipboarded down to the quarter hour. Arrive by four. Confirm the load-in path, the generator specs, the sightline from the ceremony arch to the picture window, the twelve places a caterer could hide a warming station. Photograph everything. Be back down the mountain and checked into the valley hotel before the light went, because she did not drive mountain roads in the dark, because she did not do anything she hadn't planned to do. By nightfall this room would be a folder on her laptop and she would be somewhere with cell service and a glass of wine she'd let herself half-finish.
The lot was where the plan met the first variable.
There was another car in it.
Not a car. A truck — matte and salt-streaked and parked with the careless confidence of something that belonged here, nosed in toward the split-rail fence where the snow was already collecting in the tire treads. Hers were the only other tracks, and they were fresh, and his were not.
Simone sat with her hands at ten and two and her engine ticking and did the small arithmetic of it. The venue coordinator was in Denver with a broken ankle; that was why Simone was doing this walkthrough herself instead of sending Priya. The caterer wasn't due till next week. The florist had cancelled the site visit two days ago. She had confirmed — she had confirmed, in writing, with a read receipt — that the lodge would be empty this afternoon but for the caretaker, and the caretaker drove a Subaru.
That was not a Subaru.
She knew whose it was. That was the thing she was not going to let herself know, sitting here in her warm car with the snow ticking against the windshield. She turned the engine off anyway, because sitting in the lot working herself into a state was not a plan, and Simone did not do states. She did checklists. She pulled her coat tighter, tucked the clipboard under her arm like a shield with corners, and stepped out into the cold.
The air up here was thin and clean and it went into her lungs like something with an opinion. Snow found the back of her neck. She crossed the lot with her boots crunching, past the truck — she did not look in the truck — and up the three broad steps to the great double doors, and the doors were unlocked, and the warmth met her at the threshold with the smell of woodsmoke and cedar, and Gray Hollis was standing at the hearth as if he'd been standing there her whole life waiting for her to arrive.
He wasn't doing anything. That was the maddening part; it was always the maddening part. He had a length of split wood in one hand and he was crouched at the fire feeding it, unhurried, and he looked up when the door let the cold in and he did not startle and he did not perform surprise. He just looked at her the way he looked at everything — like he had all the time in the world and had already decided how he meant to spend it.
"Simone," he said. Not Ms. Adeyemi. Never Ms. Adeyemi, not once in eight months, and she'd never corrected him, which was its own small unforgivable data point she chose not to examine.
"Mr. Hollis." She kept it crisp. She kept it vendor-voice, the tone she used on caterers who missed deadlines and mothers-of-the-bride who wanted the impossible for free. It was a good tone. It had gotten her through worse rooms than this. "I wasn't told anyone would be on site."
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.