Josh squinted at me. “Are you saying I’m not a human being?”

“I’m saying you’ve been saying a lot of words, and I still don’t know anything real about you,” I answered. “Like, who do you love?”

“My fam—”

I cut him off with a roll of my eyes. “Other than your family, have you ever chosen to love? Gotten your heart broken even?”

“I….” He stopped, frowned, then admitted, “Once.”

“Okay, tell me about that.”

He crossed his heavily muscled arms over his broad chest. “That’s private. None of your business.”

“So you’re private,” I surmised triumphantly. “Very private. You don’t even talk about the people you choose to love. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.”

The familiar rush of a speech coming together coursed through me. “How about your mom? She had a drinking problem that led to her death when you were a teenager. That had to affect you, right? Color how you approached helping people? Do you drink? How did losing your mother that young make you feel growing up? Responsible? Guilty? So guilty and responsible, you’d do whatever your remaining parent asked you to do? Even live a life you didn’t plan out for yourself—maybe one you don’t even want?”

Josh abruptly took two steps back from me. As if I was a fire that had sprung up in the middle of the cabin.

Too much. My aunt—my father’s sister, who’d had primary custody of me growing up was always warning me that I was too much whenever I questioned the guests at her many parties about their policies and values without letting up.

And I’d been warned quite a few times to “not rush right in” to the hard stuff in journalism school. That’s why I liked speech-writing. Most of my clients appreciated me getting right down to their core and turning their real backstories into speeches that won elections.

But Josh regarded me with a cold, angry look before announcing, “You were right about us needing to do an interview first. We’re not a match.”

Not a match…I backed down, something in my chest cracking at his words, even if he wasn’t referring to the fantasy relationship we never shared.

“Josh…” I began to say.

But he turned, looking all around as if searching for a lifeline out of our conversation. “Wood. You need wood. I’ll chop some for you before leaving. Stay here.”

Before I could protest, he grabbed the ax, sitting by the near-empty bin, and slammed out the back door.

As if a blizzard was a way better alternative to one more minute of conversation with me.

*     *     *

“Stay here,” he’d told me. So stay was what I did.

A few moments after the door slammed behind him, the heavy, metallic thunk of the ax striking wood sounded outside the cabin. Once, twice, then again and again. Thwunk!…Thwunk!…Thwunk!