“Yes, and thank you for that. Speaking of, what made you change your mind?”

“About…?” She was buying herself time. She knew what he was asking. He wanted to know why she’d emailed him yesterday to tell him: Plot twist. Turns out I can go up north with you after all. If the invitation is still open?

“You know,” said Bennett. “The plot twist.”

“Oh.” She looked away, touching her chin to her shoulder. A piece of hair fell over her face and he tucked it into her cap. The gesture was soft and sentimental, and wrong. But he didn’t know. And that made it a little heartbreaking, too. If they weren’t brother and sister … would she? Cocksure and charismatic, Bennett was the antithesis of herself. Morgan knew that if other women were to see her with him, their claws would come out. She had to admit she liked the thought, a little bit—that someone else could want something she had. Not that she really had him, but still. He didn’t know that.

And then there was Hudson. Moody, mercurial, and so damn unsure of himself. So like her. The two of them were more like siblings than she and Bennett and yet, when she was with him, they made a symmetry together she couldn’t explain. Everything felt at equilibrium.

He’d become less pathetic to her since she’d discovered Nan was the name of his dead wife and not his dead nana. Not that losing your grandmother wasn’t traumatic, but it was a little more expected than losing a spouse. Now that she knew that dark, depressing detail about him, it was impossible not to see it in everything he did and everything that surrounded him, from the peacock ornaments to the dusty wedding photo on the mantel.

“Hey.”

She raised her eyes to look up at Bennett. He should have been focusing on the road, but instead, he was focused on her. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Morgan shook the unsorted thoughts from her head, forcing them to scatter. “I’m sorry … for the plot twist.”

“You keep me on my toes. I love that about you.”

Love. She withered at the word.

Evergreens frosted in purest white snow drifted by. A winter wonderland. Sometimes it was easy to forget there was a whole beautiful world not far beyond Black Harbor. She couldn’t help but wonder who she might have become if she’d grown up here, just a few miles out of the city.

“So, do you still have that stellar brown-and-orange ski suit?” She recalled a photo of Bennett posing in a retro ski suit, no doubt a hand-me-down from someone who’d been alive in the 1970s. The photos, along with 479 others that she hadn’t torn to shreds, were all digitized and saved onto a crystal USB drive; the originals were separated into black photo-safe boxes in Bennett’s trunk. She was done with the Reynolds family after this weekend.