Page 16 of Angel's Smoke

She may have been slightly orgasm-addled from her earlier tub escapades, but that didn’t mean her awareness of what it meant to live life as a thirty-four-year-old single pregnant woman just went by the wayside. And if the man didn’t know that, he wasn’t as?—

Iron:Good.

Her thoughts spun to a complete stop.

Anna:Good?

More dots wiggled across the screen while she waited for an explanation. She’d stared at the damn things so intensely that the little ellipses had begun skewering the corners of her vision. After she’d gnawed off the cuticle of one finger and had gotten to work on a second, she threw the covers off, wrapped them around her shoulders, and padded over to the window in search of something to fill the wait.

Outside, the snow had begun to pick up, falling to the mostly forested ground around her cabin in an even coating of winter’s final regards. Three years ago, nestled among the blanket of blue spruce, sugar maple, and mighty American elm, at the end of a private road that could barely be called such, sat the two-bedroom cabin that had claimed Anna’s heart and dreams. The charming structure, built in 1940, had just enough of its original wood-plank charm preserved, while leaving a reasonable number of starter-home renovations for her to sink her teeth into and make this place her own.

Far enough from nosy neighbors but no more than fifteen minutes away from anything she might need, and with the perfect dappling sunrise poking through verdant evergreens, the cabin had been a secure balm to the turbulent turnstiles of her childhood homes—plural. In the end, she’d begged, and Travis had caved, largely due to his indifference at the time about where he slept, since the Internet buttered their communal bread anyway.

Slowly, over those three years, Travis had had no choice but to acquiesce to her indulgences: butcher block counters, specially mounted shelves to display her cast-iron cookware, and a large picture window overlooking the sloping mountainside that spat her out into civilization whenever she needed it.

A civilization that lately, not to put too fine a point on it, had required far too much of her participation and nowhere near enough grace in return.

The wind howled an echo of loneliness through the trees that mirrored her own, even as she stared down at the phone clenched tightly in her hands. Still no response.

Anna’s teeth met with the snap of every twig succumbing to the storm. It was even more jarring of a hit to realize that her conversation had distracted her entirely from what was happening outside her window. Now that she was in a holding cell, waiting for clarification on a single word from a man she’d barely talked to for five minutes, she was beginning to question her earlier notion of safety.

A boomingthudshook the forest around her, shaking free the loose snowfall that had already begun to collect on some of the thicker branches. Anna’s heart leaped into her throat, and her uterus’s tiny tenant performed its own symbiotic dance.

“Crap.”

Anna adjusted her glasses and tapped out what her very cells needed another living organism to hear.

Anna:Something just happened.

The three dots disappeared, and Iron’s response flared hot on the heels of her own.

Iron:Explain. You okay?

Anna:Yeah. I mean, just jittery. A really loud bang sounded outside my property. Shook a bunch of trees around my house. Wind’s picking up. Got a little spooked.

Another pause, and just when she thought he was going to ghost her response again, more of his words filled her small screen.

Iron:If someone, a male who you don’t know well, for instance, but who, so far, has a perfect track record for inquiring after your well-being, would like to inquire further, how might he do that so as not to appear . . .

She smiled, instantly seeing where his thoughts were going.

Anna:Like a multiconvicted felon on his way to his fifth parole hearing for charges of repeated sexual assaults and that one time he tried to fuck a cored pineapple at a Fourth of July barbecue in front of the kiddos?

Iron:That was . . . oddly specific.

Anna:What can I say? I have a very vivid imagination. I’m also pretty sure I’m the only millennial who still watches Dateline.

Iron:A woman who loves her murder shows. Noted.

That and home shopping. I like to keep it on when—Another crack farther down the mountain sent a shudder through the cabin, stalling her response. The small night-light she kept plugged into her hallway outlet dipped before reigniting with the more muted glow from the thing’s puny battery backup. Around her, the dinosaur oil heat furnace wound down, churning to a standstill and taking the heat along with it.

Anna:Shit. Power just went out.

Her text screen vanished, then was filled with Iron’s name, practically amplifying the force of her phone’s meager vibrating ringtone.

She answered before the first ring had ended. “Hi.”

“Tree went down?”

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