“Close the door,” the voice said.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
Iris Calloway did not move.
Snow blew past her boots and scattered across the lodge floor.
Her fingers tightened around the small box of matches in her coat pocket.
Four miles of cold had made her hands clumsy, but fear sharpened them quickly enough.
“Who are you?”
A match scratched in the darkness.
For one instant there was only a floating flame and the outline of a man’s hand.
Then he touched it to a lamp wick.
Yellow light spread across a gaunt face, an untrimmed beard, and a heavy wool coat that looked as if its owner had slept in it more than once.
Theodore Ashford stood beside the cold fireplace.
Iris knew him immediately, though they had never met.
His letters had carried the same sharp, narrow signature now written across several envelopes on a nearby table.
“Mr.
Ashford.”
He gave a tired nod.
The first thing Iris felt was relief.
The second was anger.
She stepped inside and pushed the door shut against the wind.
“They told me you were in California.”
“That’s what I wanted my creditors to believe.”
“They also told me the station was closed.”
Ashford’s eyes dropped to the carpet bag in her hand, then to the snow melting from her shawl.
“That part is true.”
The anger stayed.
“Then why did you write to me?”
“Because when I wrote, I still had a station to run.”
He crossed to a table piled with envelopes, account books, and loose papers.
None looked new.
An iron stove stood against the far wall, unlit.
Two chairs had been pulled close to it, and a blanket lay on the floor.
This was not a man comfortably hiding in his own lodge.
It was a man enduring it.
Ashford picked up one envelope.
“I sent a second letter canceling the position when the creditors closed in.
It came back three weeks later.
You had already left Chicago.”
He held it out.
Iris stared at her own name written across the front.
Mrs.
Iris Calloway.
Chicago, Illinois.
Below it, stamped in dark ink, was the evidence of bad timing: forwarding unavailable.
For weeks she had pictured Theodore Ashford as a liar who had hired a desperate woman and disappeared.
Instead, the truth was almost worse.
He had tried to stop her.
The world had simply failed to deliver the warning before she spent nearly everything she owned obeying the first promise.
“So there is no job,” she said.
“No.”
The word struck harder spoken by the man himself.
Ashford looked toward the storm clawing at the windows.
“But there’s a roof, and I can get a fire going.
You can stay tonight.
Tomorrow, when the weather breaks, you should go back to town.”
Iris laughed once.
