Snowed In with My Ex's Best Friend

Snowed In with My Ex’s Best Friend

Norah Fabis

The first thing Mara Ellison did when she arrived at Wren House was swear at the wreath.

It had come loose from its hook and was lying faceup in the snow, a green circle with a red velvet bow, as if even the Christmas decorations had given up on her.

“You and me both,” she told it.

Her boots sank nearly to the ankle as she carried the wreath onto the porch. The mountain looked different from the photographs on the real-estate listing. In those, Wren House had been tucked among silver birches beneath a picturesque dusting of snow. In person, the trees bent beneath the weight of a gathering storm, the last light had already drained from the valley, and the road behind her was disappearing by the minute.

Her phone buzzed. Another message from the realtor.

If you can sign the inventory tonight, we can get the closing documents ready for the twenty-seventh. Please don’t stay up there during the storm.

Mara looked down at the two suitcases she had brought and the three cardboard boxes still in her trunk. She had driven four hours from Boston because, after weeks of putting it off, she could no longer bear the idea of a stranger sorting through Aunt Bea’s things. A realtor who had never known Beatrice Ellison would not recognize the chipped blue mug Bea kept for people who needed a little longer at the kitchen table. Or the stack of battered novels by the bed, every last one with its ending annotated in pencil. Or the tin of old concert tickets that served as a history of all the years Bea had been brave enough to go out alone.

The closing could wait until after she had taken what mattered.

The last time she’d come to Wren House, Bea had been alive. It was late summer, the porch pots full of red geraniums. Mara had arrived an hour behind schedule because Daniel had misplaced his wallet and insisted they turn around, though she was almost certain he’d left it in his gym bag. Bea had served peach pie at the kitchen table and asked Mara how the recordings were going. Daniel had answered for her, saying the show was doing well and that the network was considering her for a promotion.

It hadn’t been a lie. Mara had been considered. The awkwardness had been hearing her career described to her aunt as an accomplishment they owned together. She had tried to correct the impression, but Daniel interrupted to tell a funny story about a work dinner. Bea had waited until he went outside to take a call, then reached across the table and put a hand over Mara’s.

“You’re allowed to finish a sentence in my house,” she’d said.

Mara had laughed. At the time, she thought it was a joke.

Now she stood beneath the porch roof, watching snow gather on the wobbly step Eli would later remember fixing, and wished she had asked Bea what else she’d seen.

There was a second reason she’d driven up before Christmas. Her Boston apartment had become a maze of boxes whose labels made her angry. DANIEL — OFFICE. DANIEL — BOOKS. WEDDING GIFTS — RETURN. There was nowhere she could stand without having to decide what belonged to the old life and what belonged to her. She’d told herself Vermont would give her a few quiet days to sort somebody else’s things. Perhaps, away from the apartment, she might learn how to sort her own.

She was already less sure of that plan than she’d been at the start of the drive.

Mara opened the front door and was greeted by the particular smell of an empty house: cold wood, dust, and something faintly sweet that might once have been cinnamon. She hauled her luggage in, found the light switch, and waited. Nothing happened.

“Excellent.”

She tried a second switch. Then a third.

The house remained dark.

Her phone flashlight found the narrow hall, the brass hooks crowded with old coats, and the crooked framed photograph of Bea standing in front of the cabin with a fish much too large for her small arms. Mara laughed despite herself.

“All right,” she said to the photograph. “One last difficult weekend. You’d like that.”

A fist struck the front door.

She jumped so hard she almost dropped her phone.

The knocking came again, three brisk blows followed by a pause. Not a frightened knock. Not an uncertain one. Whoever stood on the other side expected to be let in.

Mara opened the door with the chain still on.

The man on the porch wore a dark wool cap, a weathered green jacket, and snow up to the knees of his jeans. His shoulders nearly filled the doorway. She recognized his profile first: the straight nose she had once teased him about after a ski accident, the scar beside his brow, the mouth that had been responsible for one of the loudest laughs at her thirtieth birthday party.

Eli Mercer.

Of course.

The universe, having spent the autumn dismantling her life, had apparently found a new hobby.

“Mara,” he said.

She closed her eyes for half a second. When she opened them, he was still there.

“If Daniel sent you,” she said, “tell him I already mailed the espresso machine.”

Eli blinked. “Daniel didn’t send me.”

“Then that’s a relief.”

“You’re here.”

“Impressive observation.”

His gaze moved past her shoulder into the dark house. “Did you just get in?”

“About five minutes ago.”

“You drove the pass today?”

“I did. It turns out my driver’s license still works after a breakup.”

He absorbed that without the familiar, infuriating wince people made whenever she said the word breakup. People who had known her and Daniel as a unit for years tended to behave as if the two of them had been a local landmark recently damaged by a storm. There were sympathetic looks, awkward silences, and far too many inquiries about whether she was doing okay.

She wasn’t. But she was getting quite good at making that everyone else’s problem.

“The power’s out in half the valley,” Eli said. “I came to check the backup.”

“The backup?”

“Generator behind the shed. Bea had me service it every fall.”

Mara looked at him again. He was standing on Bea’s porch, speaking about a routine she had known nothing about, wearing the same concerned expression he used to get when someone reached for a hot pan without a mitt.

“You were looking after the house?”

“For a few years.”

“She never told me.”

“She thought you had enough on your plate.”

The comment landed more gently than it should have. Bea had known about the end of the engagement, of course. She had been the first person Mara called. She had told Mara to buy good bread, stop answering Daniel’s texts after nine, and come to Vermont when she was ready. Then Bea had died in October, before Mara found the nerve.

“I can manage,” Mara said.

“I know.”

“Then—”

“But the generator won’t start itself.”

That was Eli. Never much of a talker. Never one to mistake a refusal of sympathy for a refusal of practical help.

Mara unhooked the chain. “Fine. Five minutes.”

“It’ll take more than five.”

“You’re already testing my hospitality.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. He stepped inside, carrying a metal toolbox, and closed the door against a gust that rattled the windows.

She had expected seeing Daniel’s best friend again to feel like picking up a shard of her old life. Instead, what struck her was how much he looked like the mountains outside: familiar, unyielding, and harder to read than she remembered.

Eli had been at birthday dinners, cookouts, ski weekends. He had helped them move into their apartment. When Daniel proposed, Eli had been the one holding her coat while Daniel dug through his pockets for the ring. He had seen her at her happiest and, though she hadn’t known it at the time, at her most foolish.

Then the engagement ended. Eli hadn’t called.

She had told herself that was just how friendship worked. Daniel had been his friend first.

Eli put down his toolbox. “Where’s your car?”

“In the driveway.”

“How much fuel?”

“Enough to get home.”

“The county closed the pass twenty minutes ago.”

“They’ll reopen it.”

“Not tonight.”

Mara felt a small, unwelcome pressure behind her ribs. “How do you know?”

He pulled out his phone and showed her an alert stamped in red. ROAD CLOSURE. WHITEOUT CONDITIONS. TRAVEL PROHIBITED.

She read it twice.

“Well,” she said at last, “that seems excessive.”

Outside, the wind struck the side of the house with a sound like a freight train.

Eli looked toward the window. “It’s getting worse.”

Her phone buzzed again. This time it was Daniel.

Heard you went up there. Be careful, M.

She deleted the notification without answering.

Eli had seen the name. He looked away before she could decide whether that kindness made her feel grateful or furious.

“Let’s get the heat back on,” he said.

Mara followed him toward the back of the cabin, trying not to think about the road, or the dark, or the fact that the last man she wanted to be stranded with was the only one who had shown up.

Behind them, the front door shuddered on its hinges.