Page 22 of Embers

I can’t get away from him, so I pretend he doesn’t exist.

* * *

The next three hours pass slowly and in agonizing silence. I try to read, but I’m barely processing the pages as I flip them and have no idea what’s happening in the story.

Until finally Cal gets up from the chair where he’s been sharpening knives—none of them need it right now, but he does it anyway—and starts putting on his boots, coat, hat, and the scarf I knitted for him.

He’s going out to chop wood, which means I’ll finally be allowed to get out of this room.

As I put on my pretty red Christmas coat, he glances toward me. “Too cold out there for you today.”

“What?”

“Too cold—”

The jackass is actually planning to insist I stay inside.

“If it’s not too cold for you to go out and chop wood we don’t need, then it’s also not too cold for me to take a short walk. You can’t have it both ways.”

“You’ll freeze to death out there.”

“If it’s really that cold, then you can’t go out either. I never stay outside very long. You can’t trap me in this house like I’m a prisoner.”

He hesitates. I can clearly see in his tight expression that he’s trying to decide whether to stay in today so I will too.

“I have to get out,” I add. “Cal, Ihaveto.” For just a moment, I sound as desperate as I feel.

After another pause, he gives a soft grunt. “Okay. But just fifteen minutes today. No more.”

“Fine.” I wind a soft, wool wrap around my neck and over the bottom half of my face. Then I pull down a stocking cap over my head so it’s only my eyes that are showing.

After I put my gloves on, I move toward the door.

“Rachel.”

The one word stops me. He almost never says my name. He doesn’t call me baby anymore either. He mostly just calls me kid.

I turn around to glance back.

“Fifteen minutes. Say it.”

“Fifteen minutes,” I repeat before I finally get out the door.

It hasn’t actually snowed very much. There are only a few inches on the ground. The problem is it’s frozen into a sheet of ice, so it’s really hard to walk on.

I start into the woods since that’s the least slippery and most interesting to look at, and I take heavy steps to crunch through the frozen snow. It’s so unyielding that I’m only occasionally able to do it and it takes a lot of effort, so I eventually give up on the woods and move out onto the gravel driveway.

That’s slick too. I can’t even break through the layer of frozen snow, so I stop trying and just walk as carefully as I can on top of the ice. At least on the driveway I don’t have to fight my way through the trees.

It’s rough going, and Cal wasn’t wrong about how cold it is today. The air bites at any small bit of skin exposed between my cap and the wrap. The walk is so difficult and uncomfortable that I’m not even sure why I bother. Maybe to prove something to Cal. Or maybe to myself. Either way, I gauge seven minutes as closely as I can, and then I turn around and head back up the gravel driveway toward the cabin.

It’s worse going uphill, and I’m deeply regretting my choices as I slip and balance my way step by step. I’m not sure how far I’ve gotten since my eyes are stinging painfully, when I catch a motion of something in the woods to my right.

I look. Of course I look. No sane creature would be out in these arctic conditions.

I have to step back into the woods to figure out what the motion was.

There’s an old firepit in a small clearing. I can’t imagine Cal would do such a shoddy job of putting it together, so it was probably here when he bought the property. It’s a ring of stones piled up on each other with a rusty metal grate on top of it.

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