“There’s heat in there,” he said. “I’ll find you something dry.”
She stood for a second in the kitchen, dripping onto the worn linoleum, looking like her body still hadn’t gotten the message that the danger had passed.
“My phone,” she said hoarsely. “I think it’s dead.”
“Phone can wait. Warm up first.”
He went upstairs to the bedroom he almost never entered before dark.
Ellen’s side of the closet was still mostly intact. Not because Hank was trying to preserve a museum. Just because grief had a funny way of turning simple chores into impossible ones.
A person would think, I should box these up.
Then the next thing you knew, three years had passed.
He took down an old pair of sweatpants, a flannel shirt Ellen used to wear over a tank top when the mornings turned cold, and thick wool socks.
He stood there for half a breath too long with the shirt in his hands.
“Sorry, honey,” he murmured.
Then he carried the clothes downstairs.
The woman was sitting at his kitchen table now, wrapped in both towels, hair wet and stringy, lips pale.
He set the clothes down.
“These were my wife’s,” he said. “She’d rather somebody use ’em than shiver polite.”
A weak, shaky smile touched the corner of the woman’s mouth.
“Thank you.”
When she came back out ten minutes later, the color had started to return to her face. The sweatpants were too big in the waist and too short in the leg. Ellen had been smaller. The shirt hung loose on her shoulders.
Hank poured coffee into one mug and hot water into another because she looked like coffee might be too much for her stomach just yet.
He pushed both toward her.
“Tea bags are in that tin if you want one.”
She wrapped both hands around the hot mug like she was trying to relearn what warmth felt like.
“I’m Rachel,” she said finally. “Rachel Whitaker.”
The name meant nothing to him.
“Hank Mercer.”
“I know,” she said softly, then seemed to catch herself. “I mean—your mailbox. Out by the road.”
That made sense.
Still, that tug in his memory stayed there.
“What were you doing out in this mess?” Hank asked.
Rachel stared at the steam rising from the mug.
“Driving from the city,” she said. “I was supposed to meet someone.”
“In that storm?”
“It was important.”
Something in the way she said it made him not push.
