The winter in Maine wasn't like the winter in New York. In the city, the snow turned into a black slush within an hour, a salty soup that ruined your boots and made the subway stairs slippery. Here, the snow was just white. It piled up against the side of the cabin until the bottom half of the windows were blocked, turning the world outside into a blurry, glowing wall of light.
Lena had been at the cabin for nearly five months.
The sink started leaking on a Tuesday in November. It wasn't a big leak, just a slow, rhythmic plink that echoed in the quiet kitchen. She sat on the floor with a wrench she'd found in the shed, her breath blooming in the cold air because she was trying to save on heating oil. She didn't know how to fix a sink. She'd spent twenty minutes watching a video on her phone, but her signal was weak and the video kept buffering at the exact moment the guy showed which way to turn the valve.
"Move, Barnaby," she muttered. The cat was sitting on her shin, his weight making her leg go numb. He flicked his tail and stayed put.
She tightened the nut until her arm shook and the metal bit into her palm. The dripping stopped. She stayed there on the cold linoleum for a long time, just waiting for the next plink. It never came. She felt a weird, heavy surge of pride. It was just a pipe, but it was the first thing in her life she'd fixed without asking a man for a tool or a favor.
Internal thoughts are messy and blunt. I did it. Julian would have called the super and complained for three days. Adrian would have probably just replaced the whole house or told me to move to a hotel. I did it with a rusty wrench and a buffering video. I'm a plumber now. My back hurts like hell.
She got up and wiped her hands on her jeans. The stain didn't come out. She didn't care.
December came with a storm that knocked the power out for three days. Lena sat in the dark with a stack of old paperbacks she'd found in the loft. She read by candlelight, the flame dancing in the drafts that snuck through the floorboards. It was lonely, but it wasn't the scary kind of lonely. It was just... space. For the first time, her head wasn't full of Julian's debts or the sound of Cassin's voice. It was just her and the sound of the wind.
One afternoon, when the roads had finally been cleared of ice, she walked down to the mailbox at the end of the long driveway. It was a half-mile trek through the slush. She saw a white envelope sticking out. It didn't have a return address. It didn't even have a stamp. Just her name—the new name on her passport—written in a handwriting she recognized immediately. It was sharp, the letters leaning slightly to the right, the way a person writes when they're used to filling out forms in a hurry.
She didn't open it on the road. Her fingers were too cold, and she didn't want the wind to catch whatever was inside. She walked back, her boots crunching in the crusty snow, and sat at the kitchen table.
There was no letter. Just a newspaper clipping from a New York tabloid. The headline was small: CASSIN INDICTED ON FEDERAL RACKETEERING CHARGES. Underneath, a shorter paragraph mentioned an "anonymous source" who had provided a digital map of the organization's financial history.
In the bottom corner of the clipping, there was a small, messy sketch. A swallow. Just a few lines of ink, but it was enough.
Lena looked at the drawing for an hour. It wasn't a "miss you" or a "see you soon." It was a receipt. It was a ghost saying the debt was settled. She felt a rush of heat in her chest, a stinging in her eyes that she tried to blink away. He wasn't dead. Or at least, he wasn't dead yet. He was out there somewhere, moving through the shadows he'd spent his whole life navigating.
She thought about getting in the truck. She thought about driving back to the city, or to the border, or to wherever a man like Adrian goes when he's finished. But she didn't move. She realized she didn't want to find him. If she found him, she'd find the warehouse. She'd find the smell of gunpowder. She'd find the person she used to be.
She got up and walked to the woodstove. She opened the heavy iron door and tossed the clipping inside. She watched the paper curl, the headline turning black, the little swallow disappearing into the orange glow of the embers.
"Goodbye, Adrian," she whispered.
The next morning, she took the silver drive—the real one—and walked down to the cliff side. The ocean was grey and angry, the waves smashing against the frozen rocks below. She held the drive in her palm. It looked like a toy. It was hard to believe this was the thing that had cost so much blood.
She didn't make a speech. She didn't cry. She just threw it as hard as she could. It spun through the air, a tiny flash of silver against the grey sky, and then it was gone. The ocean swallowed it without a sound.
She walked back to the cabin. The porch steps creaked under her weight. She spent the rest of the day painting the kitchen cabinets. They were a dingy, peeling yellow, and she'd bought a can of white paint at the hardware store. It was a messy job. She got paint in her hair and on the floor, and Barnaby stepped in the tray and tracked white paw prints across the rug.
She laughed. It was a short, rusty sound, but it was real.
As the sun went down, throwing long, purple shadows across the snow, Lena sat on the porch with a mug of tea. The woods were quiet now. The fear that had lived in the back of her throat for three years was gone. It hadn't disappeared all at once; it had just worn away, like a stone in a river.
She realized then that Adrian hadn't saved her. Not really. He'd given her a map and a truck, but she was the one who had to drive. She was the one who had to learn how to exist when no one was watching.
Internal thoughts are flat but steady. He's gone. Julian is gone. I'm thirty years old and I'm starting over in a house that smells like wet paint and cat food. It's not a movie. There's no music. It's just me.
She looked at her hands. They were rougher now. Her fingernails were short, and she had a scar on her thumb from the wrench. They weren't "club" hands anymore. They were her hands.
She went inside and locked the door. Not because she was afraid someone was coming, but because it was cold outside and she wanted to keep the heat in. She climbed the ladder to the loft and pulled the quilt up to her chin. The shadows in the corners of the room didn't look like men anymore. They were just shapes. They were just the absence of light.
She thought about the red velvet walls of the Lounge. They seemed like a dream now, or a memory of a movie she'd seen a long time ago. All that noise, the perfume, the fake smiles—it had all faded into this. This quiet. This peace.
She closed her eyes and listened to the wind rattling the chimney. She wasn't waiting for a knight. She wasn't waiting for a brother to come home with a pocket full of trouble. She was just a woman in a cabin, and for the first time in her life, that was more than enough.
Some hearts come into your life to save you, and some come to break you. But some—the rarest kind—they just come to teach you how to stand up when the world stops turning. Adrian was the lesson. Maine was the life.
Lena turned off the lamp and let the darkness take the room. She wasn't afraid. She just went to sleep.