Snowed In at Willow Creek – Part 1

“You’re the lawyer.”

It wasn’t a question. The woman standing in the doorway of the cabin said it the way you’d say you’re the raccoon that’s been in my trash.

Hannah Brooks shifted her leather folder to her other arm and tried to smile. Snow was already sticking to her good wool coat. Her city boots, the expensive ones, were soaked through.

“Hannah Brooks, Whitman & Cole. You must be Sofia Reyes.” She held out her hand. “I emailed.”

“Six times.” Sofia didn’t take the hand. She was tall, in a red flannel shirt with sawdust on the sleeves, dark hair tied back with what looked like a strip of leather. “And I answered six times. The answer is no.”

“My client has increased the offer.”

“Your client can increase it to the moon.” Sofia started to close the door. “Drive safe. There’s a storm coming.”

“Please.” Hannah put her hand flat on the door. She hated how desperate it sounded. “Ten minutes. I drove four hours. Just let me show you the numbers.”

Sofia looked at her hand on the door. Then at the sky behind her, where the clouds had turned a thick, heavy grey.

“Ten minutes,” she said. “Then you leave before the roads close.”

---

The cabin was not what Hannah had expected.

From the photos, she’d pictured something tired and falling apart. Instead it was warm and full of light, all honey-coloured wood and big windows looking out over a frozen lake. There were shelves Sofia had obviously built herself, curved and smooth like riverstones. A wood stove crackled in the corner. Everything smelled of cedar and coffee.

“You made all this?” Hannah asked before she could stop herself.

“My grandfather built the cabin. I made the rest.” Sofia pointed at a chair. “Sit. Nine minutes.”

Hannah sat. She opened the folder. She talked about market value and development potential and a resort with forty luxury units along the shore. She’d given the speech a hundred times. It had never sounded so ugly.

Sofia listened without interrupting. When Hannah finished, she was quiet for a while.

“Forty units,” she said. “On this lake.”

“It would bring jobs to the area. Tourism.”

“There are loons that nest on that shore every spring,” Sofia said. “My grandfather used to wake me at five a.m. to listen to them.” She stood up. “Your ten minutes are over.”

Hannah closed the folder slowly. For the first time in a long time, she didn’t have an argument ready.

She walked to the door and opened it.

The world outside had disappeared.

---

It was a white wall. Snow was falling so thick and fast that Hannah couldn’t see her car, parked thirty feet away. The wind screamed through the pines. Somewhere a branch cracked like a gunshot.

“Oh,” she said faintly.

Sofia came up behind her and swore under her breath.

“That’s not a storm,” she said. “That’s a blizzard. They said it wasn’t coming till midnight.”

“I can make it to the main road.”

“You can make it into the lake.” Sofia pushed the door shut against the wind. She looked at Hannah for a long moment, and Hannah could see her doing some kind of internal calculation, none of it happy. “You’re staying.”

“I really don’t think,”

“You’re staying,” Sofia repeated. “I’m not digging a lawyer out of a snowbank tomorrow. I’d have to fill out paperwork.”

---

By six o’clock the power was out.

By seven, Hannah was sitting on a sheepskin rug in front of the wood stove, wrapped in a borrowed sweater three sizes too big, eating tomato soup that Sofia had heated in an iron pot on top of the stove. Her expensive boots were drying on the hearth. Her phone had no signal.

She felt, absurdly, happier than she had in months.

“This is good soup,” she said.

“It’s from a can.”

“It’s good can soup.”

Sofia almost smiled. She was sitting on the other side of the rug, her back against the sofa, long legs stretched toward the fire. The light turned her skin gold. She had taken the leather strip out of her hair, and it fell dark and loose over her shoulders.

Hannah realised she was staring and looked at her soup.

“Can I ask you something?” Sofia said.

“Sure.”

“Do you actually like your job?”

Nobody had ever asked her that. Not her parents, not her colleagues, not her ex-girlfriend Rachel, who had left last spring saying Hannah was married to Whitman & Cole and she was tired of being the mistress.

“I’m good at it,” Hannah said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

The fire popped. Wind pushed against the windows.

“No,” Hannah said quietly. “I don’t think I do.”

Sofia didn’t say anything. She just nodded, as if she’d known all along, and reached over to put another log on the stove. Her arm brushed Hannah’s knee as she did it. It was nothing. It was an accident. Hannah felt it everywhere.

---

They talked for hours.

About Sofia’s grandfather, who had been a carpenter from Puerto Rico and came to Vermont in 1962 for one winter and never left. About Hannah’s childhood in a Boston suburb where everything was beige and quiet and correct. About the furniture Sofia made and sold to galleries in New York, each piece from a single tree. About the paintings Hannah had stopped making when she was twenty-two because law school didn’t leave room.

“You paint?” Sofia sounded surprised.

“Painted. Past tense.”

“Why past tense?”

Hannah opened her mouth to give the usual answer, no time, too busy, it wasn’t practical, and found she was tired of saying it.

“Because I was scared,” she said. “Scared I wasn’t good enough. Law was safe.”

Sofia looked at her for a long moment in the firelight.

“For the record,” she said, “I was scared of you this afternoon.”

“Of me?”

“You walked up my path in those ridiculous boots looking like a magazine cover, and I thought, oh no.” Sofia’s voice had gone very soft. “I thought, if she smiles at me, I’m going to sell her the whole lake.”

Hannah forgot how to breathe.

“I did smile at you,” she said. “You closed the door in my face.”

“Yes,” Sofia said. “That’s how scared I was.”

---

Neither of them moved for a long time.

The fire crackled. The storm howled. Somewhere in the dark, the cabin creaked under the weight of the snow, like a ship at sea.

“Sofia,” Hannah said eventually. “I’m not going to sell you anything.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to tell my client no.”

Sofia turned her head. “You can’t do that. You’ll lose your job.”

“Probably.” Hannah was surprised by how little that word frightened her. “I think I’d like to lose it.”

Sofia shifted across the sheepskin rug until they were sitting side by side, shoulders touching. Her hand found Hannah’s on the rug between them. Her fingers were rough from work, warm from the fire.

“Can I kiss you?” Sofia asked. “I don’t want to be the kind of woman who kisses someone just because there’s a blizzard.”

“What kind of woman do you want to be?”

“The kind who would have kissed you anyway.”

Hannah turned and kissed her first.

Sofia made a soft, surprised sound against her mouth, and then her hand was in Hannah’s hair and she was kissing her back, slow and deep and certain, as if she had been thinking about it since the doorstep. The fire threw their shadows huge across the log walls. The storm went on and on outside, and inside, nothing else existed.

Later, Sofia stood and held out her hand, the way you’d offer someone a dance.

“It’s cold upstairs,” she said. “But I have a lot of quilts.”

“I’m a city girl,” Hannah said, taking her hand. “I’ll need you to keep me warm.”

“I intend to.”

The loft room was dark except for the faint blue light of the snow at the window. Under three heavy quilts that Sofia’s grandmother had sewn, the rest of the world fell away entirely: the job, the folder, the forty luxury units, the careful beige life Hannah had built. There was only warmth, and slowness, and the astonishing feeling of being wanted exactly as she was.

---

In the morning, the storm was gone.

Hannah woke to blinding white light and total silence. She sat up, wrapped in a quilt, and looked out the loft window. The whole world was buried under two feet of perfect, untouched snow. The lake was a sheet of white. The pines were bent and sparkling. And on the porch below, Sofia was shovelling a path with steam rising from a mug of coffee balanced on the railing.

Hannah watched her for a long time.

Then she found her phone. One bar of signal. Eleven emails from her boss.

She opened a new one and typed:

Mr. Whitman, the owner at Willow Creek will not sell. I’ve advised her not to. Please accept this as my resignation, effective immediately. I’m taking some time off to paint.

She read it twice. Her hands were shaking. She pressed send.

Then she went downstairs in Sofia’s sweater and thick wool socks, opened the front door, and stepped out onto the porch into the bright, freezing morning.

Sofia turned, shovel in hand, cheeks red with cold.

“The roads will be clear by afternoon,” she said. “You can go home.”

“I just quit my job,” Hannah said.

Sofia dropped the shovel.

“You what?”

“I quit.” Hannah laughed. It came out wild and shaky and wonderful. “I don’t have a job. I don’t really have a home, I hate my apartment. I have,” she looked down at herself, “your sweater and some very wet boots.”

Sofia walked up the porch steps slowly, snow crunching under her boots. She stopped in front of Hannah and looked at her as if she couldn’t quite believe she was real.

“The loons come back in April,” Sofia said quietly. “If you’re still around.”

Hannah thought about the beige suburb. The glass office. Rachel, saying she was married to her job.

She thought about five a.m. and a frozen lake and the sound of birds she had never heard.

“I think,” she said, “I’d like to hear them.”

Sofia kissed her right there on the snowy porch, both of them laughing into it, the coffee going cold on the railing and the whole white world shining around them.

---

Next: Part 2, When the Loons Return. April at the lake, an easel on the porch, and a letter from Boston that could take everything away.