The Unwritten Accord

The road dwindled to a single track long before the cabin appeared—just a smudge of dark timber against the frost-washed moor. Elara parked beside a lopsided stack of firewood, the engine ticking in the cold. The world beyond the windshield was vast and soundless, a sweep of heather and rock under a shifting slate sky. She took a breath and held it, as if the air might change if she committed it to memory. Then she exhaled, reached for her satchel, and reminded herself why she was here.

Two weeks. A lost charter. Tenure. It had to be enough.

Inside, the cabin smelled faintly of old smoke and pine cleaner. The single room was smaller than the pictures suggested, but the table by the window was sturdy, and the brick fireplace took up most of one wall. The narrow hallway led to a bathroom and, at the end, a bedroom just big enough for a double bed and a battered dresser. It would work. It was quiet. It was hers.

She carried in her luggage with efficient trips, boots thudding softly against the wooden floor. Three suitcases. One crate she had reinforced with duct tape and anxiety. By the time the last case thumped over the threshold, her cheeks burned from the wind and her fingers ached. She rubbed her hands together and stood for a moment, listening to the wind slip around the eaves, and then she got to work.

The table by the window became a careful landscape. She laid down a felt desk pad and placed her laptop at the center, then arranged her binders around it in a semi-circle like petals. Each spine was labeled in neat, block letters: Parish Registers—Skye, 1640–1680; MacLeod Correspondence; Cartography and Celestial Events; Oral Histories and Folklore; Legal Fragments. The tabs within were color-coded—yellow for primary sources, blue for cross-references, green for speculative links she refused to call speculation out loud. She unscrewed a small pen caddy and filled it with highlighters, index tabs, and three mechanical pencils. She lined the pencils parallel to the table’s edge, the erasers pointing left.

Her screensaver glowed with her university crest before giving way to the folder structure she’d built over six months. It soothed her—the nested logic of it, the way everything had a place. The drive labeled MACLEOD_ARCHIVE opened with a soft chime. She connected the portable scanner she’d borrowed from the library staff with a plea and a cookie platter. She tested the light. It flickered once, then steadied.

She unpacked the crate last. Inside, wrapped in layers of bubble wrap and cloth, were her most precious tools: a magnifying visor, two pairs of archival gloves, soft brushes, a loupe. A family of delicate things. She set each item down with care, pausing now and then to glance up at the view—moor, stone, a dark line of trees nudging the horizon. The sky was shifting. She’d checked the forecasts obsessively. A storm later in the week, possibly sooner. The urgency pricked at her skin, but she refused to rush. She was good because she was methodical.

When everything was where it needed to be, she unzipped the red binder marked Daily Plan. Today’s list was already written in tight script: Arrive. Inspect cabin. Set workspace. Power check. Wifi? Back-up power bank test. Then: Review St. Columba Parish marginalia, begin celestial cross-references, draft outline for chapter two. She slid her finger under the elastic band and flipped to the next page—two weeks of boxes, each line a promise to herself.

The kettle felt heavier than it looked when she filled it. She craved tea, the kind that warmed from the inside out and steadied her racing thoughts. While it simmered, she tuned the little radio on the counter until a crisp voice broke through the static with local news and the weather. “A cold snap for the next few days, with potential snow on the higher passes. Visitors advised to stock up and stay put if necessary.” She glanced at the pantry. The landlord had left dry goods and canned soup. She’d brought her own staples. She would be fine.

Her tea steamed next to the keyboard as she slid on her glasses and opened the PDF of the parish records she’d pored over a hundred times. She knew the ink, the hands, the letters that slanted like someone in a hurry to be done. Between the lines of births and deaths, in the cramped note margins that had driven her half-mad with hope, there it was again: an annotation tied to a date and a lunar phase. She could see the symbols even with her eyes closed. The clue everyone had read past because they were looking for a chest and a key, not a night sky.

She pulled the Celestial Events binder closer and opened to the printed charts. Moonrise tables. Seasonal star positions. She traced the columns as if they were roads. If the scribe had recorded the charter beneath the “silver crown” at its zenith, the timing would have been precise. She thought of the ruined keep on the ridge, of stories tangled like roots, of the habit people had of hiding truth in plain sight.

Her phone lit up on the table with a notification. Professor Albright: Let me know when you land. Reminder: The committee meets next month; a compelling draft would be timely. She set the phone face-down and sipped her tea. Her heartbeat quickened anyway.

She stood to coax the fireplace into life. Kindling, paper, larger logs in a careful teepee. The match flared, and the dry wood caught quickly. The first lift of heat loosened something in her shoulders. She dragged the small rug closer and sat there for a moment, stretching her toes toward the fire. When she was a child, she’d believed that discovery would feel like lightning. As an adult, she’d learned it felt like this—like sitting on a wooden floor in a cold room, breath steady, bones warmer by degrees, and knowing that if she tightened every thread and checked every knot, the weave would hold.

Back at the table, she adjusted her chair so her knees brushed the drawer. She laid a parchment reproduction next to her laptop and pressed the magnifying visor down over her hair. The world narrowed to lines on paper and the slight tremble of her own breath. She made her first notation of the trip, a small, deliberate stroke. The storm could come when it wanted. She had her plan. She had time—if she used it perfectly.

The knock wasn’t a knock so much as a cheerful thud-thud and the scrape of boots on the porch. Elara blinked at the tiny clock in the corner of her screen. It wasn’t late, but no one should have been near enough to knock. She pushed back her chair. The second thud was followed by a voice—low, warm, too loud for the quiet. “Hello? Anyone here? The door was sticking—hang on—”

“Don’t—” she started, but the latch gave and the door swung inward with a gust of cold air and a man filling the frame like he owned doorways as a hobby.

Snow pocked his dark jacket and clung to his curls. He grinned when he saw her, and only someone very sure of himself would grin that way. The kind of grin that fixed itself as if it had been waiting for this moment, for her. His eyes were an unreadable grey that kept moving—over her, over the binders, over the fire—and then back to her like he was making a private catalogue.

“Hi,” he said, breathless from the wind and the hill. “Julian Thorne. You must be Dr. Vance.”

For a second, her brain made that tiny static sound it did when something went off-script. Then the static snapped back into a line of cold clarity, and she straightened. “I mustn’t,” she said, because she heard her own voice when she was nervous and it always came out too crisp. “But I am.”

“Great,” he said, as if she’d told him the weather would be sunny. He stepped inside, nudged the door shut with his hip, and hit the mat with a practiced stomp, the kind that dislodged clumps of snow. He smelled like cold air and something clean. He held up his phone. “Signal died three miles back. I tried calling the landlord. My booking confirms this cabin for the next two weeks.” He glanced past her at the table, at the fortress of binders. “You too, I see.”

Elara’s fingers curled around the back of her chair. Her mouth went dry with a prickly kind of outrage. She knew Julian Thorne by reputation and by months of professional irritation. He was the man whose name floated through conference halls like a dare. The one who charmed donors with drone footage and then posted teasers of their finds in artful black-and-white. He could find a burial site by “reading the land,” according to his last interview. She read the footnotes. She wrote them.

“I have a confirmation as well.” She tried to make her voice soft. It came out flatter than she liked. “There must be a mistake.”

He put his duffel down just inside the door, careful not to drip on the rug, and rubbed his hands together in front of the fire. “There usually is,” he said, more to the room than to her. “My driver nearly slid into a sheep on that narrow bend.”

“There’s only one road,” she said, and then stopped, because she didn’t owe him conversational niceties. She owed herself boundaries.

His gaze landed on the MacLeod Correspondence binder. He didn’t approach, but his mouth tipped up. “We’re after the same ghost, then.”

“It’s not a ghost,” she said sharply. “It’s a legal instrument.”

“Right,” he said, soft and agreeable, like he was letting her win a point he hadn’t contested. “A very old piece of paper with the potential to ignite several academic feuds and make your tenure committee weep tears of joy.”

He peeled off his gloves, and she realized his hands were nicked and browned in a way her own never would be no matter how many site visits she did. He looked like he belonged outside. He looked like mess. Her chest tightened.

“This is a one-bedroom,” she said. “There’s a bed. One couch. There are no other rentals in a hundred miles, if the listing is accurate. Which, apparently, it isn’t.”

Julian whistled low. “Romantic,” he said with a teasing lilt that made her spine stiffen. “Don’t worry. I don’t snore. Much.” He glanced at the window, where the sky had dropped a shade. “And the storm will be here by tomorrow, if not tonight. I passed a sign half-buried already.”

He took a step toward the table, and something in Elara reacted before she could school it—her shoulders went up, then her hand came up, palm out. He stopped. He raised his hands, palms shining red from the cold. “I won’t touch,” he said, tone gentler. “Promise.”

“I need quiet,” she said. “And space.”

“And I need four walls and a fire,” he said. “Preferably without frostbite.” He gestured toward the couch. “I can take the couch. I’m housebroken. The kitchen is neutral territory.” His smile flashed again, but it was tempered now. “Look, Elara—may I call you Elara?”

“No,” she said, too quickly. “Dr. Vance.”

“Dr. Vance,” he said, nodding as if that were a satisfying name. “We both booked. We both have cause to stay. We could waste the light arguing, or we could… coexist.”

She hated that he made sense. She hated that he used her name like he’d tasted it. She hated most of all that he stood so at ease in a room that had felt like hers thirty minutes ago.

He shrugged out of his jacket and shook it out near the door. Underneath, he wore a dark sweater that clung to the shape of him, the sort of simple thing that would look disheveled on anyone else and on him looked intentional. His eyes flicked to the kettle. “Is that tea? If I beg, will you share? I brought coffee, but it’s the kind that could strip paint.”

She hesitated, then reached for a second mug with jerky deliberation, annoyed at the automatic hospitality. He accepted it with a murmur that sounded sincere. He wrapped his hands around it and closed his eyes for a second, like heat was a prayer. Annoyance slid sideways into something else—resentment tinged with reluctant human empathy. She looked away.

He took a careful sip, then set the mug on the edge of the counter. He lingered near the fire, rotating his wrists toward the warmth. “For what it’s worth,” he said, eyes on the flames, “I’ve been wanting to meet you properly. Your paper on ecclesiastical marginalia and intentional misdirection—”

Her head snapped up despite herself. “You read that.”

“Twice,” he said, his mouth curving around it like it pleased him to say it. “You made me check three old assumptions at the door. I like that in a colleague.”

She didn’t know what to do with the unexpected praise. It didn’t fit the thumbnail she’d kept of him in her brain. She lifted her chin. “Colleagues don’t poach one another’s leads.”

“And rivals aren’t obliged to pretend they’re not in the same race,” he said easily. “But I’m not here to steal. We can draw lines.”

Her gaze fell to the table, to the neat edges of her work. She exhaled. “Fine. Your couch. Your bags stay on your side. We’ll agree on hours.”

“Done,” he said, and the relief was so bright it warmed the room more than the fire for a heartbeat. He glanced around, then toward the far wall. “I’ll mark my territory with something subtle. A throw pillow.”

“If you scratch anything, I will invoice you,” she said.

He laughed, and the sound settled under her skin in a way she refused to examine. He bent to pick up his duffel and, as he did, he looked at her again, more soberly this time. “I meant it about your work,” he said softly. “And about not touching your notes.”

She nodded without smiling, because she didn’t trust what her face might do if she did. She turned back to her laptop and lifted her visor. The visor made the world small again, safe in its familiar frame. But the other half of the room had changed. It held a man warming his hands by her fire, a rival with a careless grin and careful eyes, and the quiet she’d packed with her had been broken wide open. She felt the fracture line run through the day, neat as chalk.

The kettle hissed faintly, a counterpoint to the erratic bite of wind at the window. Elara’s visor cut the room in two, her half careful and flat and reasonable. His half a disruption she could not edit. She lifted the visor and slid it onto the table, then reached for her phone where it lay charging like a tether she could grip.

“My confirmation email has the owner’s number,” she said, already swiping to recent calls. “We’ll clear this up and you can go.”

Julian took his mug back up as if they were discussing dinner plans, not exile. “Or we can both go,” he offered. “To the pub. Where there are spare rooms.”

“There aren’t,” she said, impatient. “This week is the Glenfinnan Winter Lights Festival. Everything is booked.”

He arched a brow, intrigued. “You planned your research trip during a festival.”

“I planned it during the quiet season. The festival was announced two months ago.” She hit dial, listening to the ring, the wooden throb of it through the speaker. “And I don’t go to pubs during fieldwork.”

The call picked up with a clatter and a breathless hello. “Alec MacInnes,” a voice said, roughened by years and cold air.

“Mr. MacInnes, this is Dr. Elara Vance. I’m at the cabin.”

“Oh, aye, Dr. Vance—reached all right then? Fire’s good?”

“The fire is fine,” she said. She glanced at Julian, whose expression had softened with the sound of the man’s voice. “But there’s an issue. A man named Julian Thorne has also arrived. He claims—”

“Claims?” Julian mouthed, affronted, but he grinned.

“He has a reservation for the same dates,” Elara finished, barely refraining from adding allegedly.

Alec made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a wince. In the background came the muffled clamor of voices, laughter, and a fiddle that rose and fell. “Ach. I feared that. The booking platform’s been a nightmare since my nephew mucked with the calendar. I tried to sort it last night but the signal went. Let me pull up the ledger.”

Papers shuffled. Elara could feel her jaw tightening with each second. She didn’t look at Julian. She could feel him—his height against the firelight, the weight of his attention like a hand at the small of her back she refused to acknowledge.

“Right,” Alec said finally. “I’ve you, Dr. Vance, from the first to the fifteenth. Paid in full. And Mr. Thorne—”

Julian stepped closer, not quite within her chalked boundaries, but close enough for their shoulders to sense each other. “Yes, sir,” he said calmly. “Julian Thorne. Thirteenth to the twenty-seventh, but I asked to shift two days early because of the storm. Your niece confirmed in an email.”

“Aye, she would’ve,” Alec said, rueful. “She’s been helping, bless her, but she shouldn’t have moved it without clearing the calendar. That’s on me.” The fiddle rose to a jig; someone whooped. “And Lord forgive me, there’s no other place for miles. The festival’s brought the whole of the Highlands and half of Glasgow. My cousin’s inn is full to the rafters and the glamping pods are shut for the season. The road to Arisaig’s already iffy.”

Elara pressed her fingers into the meat of her palm until she felt the bite of her nails. “There must be something.”

“I’d put Mr. Thorne in my own spare room,” Alec said, earnest, “but I’ve got the grandkids down from Skye and the dog in the other bed. You’ve a fire and four walls there, and we’re due to lose power tonight. I can bring another quilt and a camp cot first thing in the morn—if the road holds.”

Julian turned his head slightly, close enough that she could see the faint stubble along his jaw, the nick near his ear as if he’d shaved in a hurry. “We can make it work,” he said, pitching his voice for Alec but aiming it at her, the warmth in it a coaxing she resisted on principle. “I’ll take the couch. I’ll be quiet. I won’t touch her… legal instruments.”

Even Alec laughed at that, a quick, apologetic chuckle. “He’s a decent lad, Dr. Vance. A bit of a whirlwind, but decent.”

Elara closed her eyes for one brief second, not for prayer but for order. When she opened them, the fire was still burning, the wind still worrying the eaves, Julian still here. The facts lined up like numbers she could not make say something else.

“So there are no other accommodations,” she said flatly.

“Not within a hundred miles,” Alec confirmed. “And even if you found one, you might not get there before the drifts. The lights are beautiful but they make fools of people, coming all this way on slick roads.” His voice softened. “I’m sorry, lass. Truly.”

She swallowed down a dozen cutting replies, none of which would change weather or beds. “Bring the cot if you can,” she said, formal. “We’ll… arrange something tonight.”

“Good woman,” Alec said, relief obvious. “I’ll come by at first light with more kindling and a battery lantern. Keep the fire fed. Boil water before the power goes.”

“We’ve got it,” Julian said, easy. It struck her then—the shape of we, as if he’d stepped into that plural without thinking.

She ended the call and set the phone down carefully, like a fragile thing. The room buzzed with the energy of a decision not entirely hers. She met Julian’s eyes, steady grey, infuriatingly kind.

“Well,” he said, softer now, reading her temper as if it were a map. “That settles the question of where I sleep.”

“On the couch,” she said immediately, crisp. “Your bags stay over there. You don’t touch my notes. We’ll set hours—quiet after ten. No music. No… hovering.”

He held up a hand in surrender, the corners of his mouth threatening. “No hovering. I’m excellent at staying on my side. We can draw a line.” His gaze flicked to the floor between their halves. “Chalk?”

She pulled the stub of white from the drawer and set it on the table without comment. He did not reach for it. He waited, and she hated that the patience made something in her unclench.

She stood, smoothed her sweater, and knelt in the narrow lane between the table and the couch, the wood cool beneath her jeans. Julian stayed back as she dragged the chalk in a straight, authoritative stripe across the floorboards, bisecting the room with the same ruthless precision she applied to footnotes. The line ran under the window, past the hearth, all the way to the door. When she finished, she set the chalk down like a period.

“There,” she said.

He looked at the line, then back at her. “Understood.”

Outside, the wind threw a handful of sleet against the glass. Inside, the kettle clicked off with a soft, domestic finality. Julian bent, picked up his duffel, and carried it to the far side, careful not to scuff the boards. He set it down and glanced at the couch, then at her, his voice lighter. “If I stop breathing in the night from frozen lungs, feel free to revive me. Purely professional.”

“You’ll be fine,” she said, but the picture of him shivering made something traitorous flutter low in her chest. She shut it down. “We coexist. We are adults.”

“We are,” he agreed. He moved to the cupboard, paused. “May I have a plate? I brought oatcakes. I’ll keep crumbs to my side.”

She flicked her chin in assent. His sleeve brushed the edge of the invisible line as he reached, and she felt the tremor of that almost-touch all the way up her arm, ridiculous and unwelcome. She busied herself with aligning her pen to the edge of her notebook, with pretending the chalk could hold back the tide of everything else the storm might blow in.

Julian poured a small stack of oatcakes onto the plate and set it on the edge of his territory, a deliberate buffer between them. “We’ll manage,” he said, more to the room than to her. “It’s a roof and a fireplace. Two weeks.” His eyes lifted, met hers without force. “We’re adults.”

She bristled at the implication. “Adults who require very different environments.” She turned to her binders, fingers steadying themselves on the familiar texture of the tabs. “I came here to work. I need quiet. I can’t—” She searched for a word that wasn’t dramatic. “—function with distractions.”

“Then I won’t be one.” He leaned a hip against the back of the couch, careful not to crowd. “I can be quiet. I can work outside during daylight. I can keep my mess to a tight radius.” His mouth tipped. “I can even use coasters.”

“This isn’t a joke.” She felt the heat rise up her throat—the day sliding out from under her plan. “I can’t share living space with someone whose idea of order is placing a plate on his suitcase.”

He glanced at the plate, as if surprised to find it there, and moved it to the small table in the corner. “Sorted.” His voice softened. “Elara—Dr. Vance—look. I don’t like this either. I don’t want to trip over your color-coded universe any more than you want to trip over my boots.” His gaze flicked to the window, the sleet beading on the glass. “But we’re not getting out tonight.”

The wind pressed the eaves. She felt the stubbornness in her bones rise to meet it. “There must be somewhere else. A shed. A barn.”

“Where you’d freeze,” he said mildly. “And where your precious notes would curl like leaves. You heard Alec.”

She did not want to hear his voice saying the landlord’s name with that ease, like they were already part of the same place. She wrapped her arms around herself, refused to look at the couch that would soon hold him, the pillow that would smell different by morning. “The power is going to go out.”

“Which is more reason to stay put.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Unless you’ve got a secret generator and a spare cottage tucked in your binders.”

She unclenched her jaw one notch. “You think if you tease me I’ll forget this is a boundary violation.”

“I think if you get to say what it is for you, I get to say what it is for me.” His tone was gentle, not combative. “For me, it’s bad luck and a calendar error and a storm I can’t charm my way through. For you, it’s an intrusion. Both can be true. And we can still coexist.”

Her throat threatened to tighten. She tamped it down ruthlessly. “Coexistence implies parity. We are not on equal footing here. I reserved this cabin months ago. I have tenure on the line. I have a plan. Your plan appears to be… vibes and oatcakes.”

He laughed under his breath. She hated that the sound loosened something inside her. “There are worse plans,” he said. Then, more serious: “I won’t sabotage you. I won’t even speak to you if you don’t want me to.” His eyes searched her face and landed on her mouth, then lifted. “But I’m not walking out onto that road to sleep in a snowbank because your advisor likes you when you’re isolated.”

Her spine jerked. “Don’t pretend to know my advisor.”

“I don’t.” He held up his bandaged palm as if taking an oath he hadn’t yet earned. “I know the look. The one you had when you told Alec you’d handle it.” He dropped his hand. “You shouldn’t have to handle it alone. Not a storm and not… everything else.”

He was too close to the truth, and that made her angry. She organized the papers on her table with quick, precise movements. “You talk like a person in a documentary about expeditions who confuses improvisation with expertise.”

“And you talk like a person who carries a first-aid kit for people she’s never met.” His eyes warmed, not unkind. “We’re both good at what we’re good at. Sharing a room won’t change that.”

She stared at him, at his posture—ready but not pushy, waiting for her to pass a verdict she felt trapped into making. The line on the floor sat stark as a rule she’d written because she had to. She could feel him on the other side of it, his heat, the steady part of him that had listened to Alec and hadn’t flinched when she sharpened every word.

“I am not pivoting my entire process because you prefer chaos,” she said, each word clipped, clean. “You don’t play music while I’m working. You don’t leave gear out. No shoes in the main room. No calls on speaker. No… humming. And we set hours—my hours.”

He nodded without hesitation. “Done. I’ll keep fieldwork daylight only. I’ll cook after you’re finished. I’ll clean after myself, and probably after you, because I can’t help it.” His smile crooked. “I’ll even adopt a coaster.”

She did not want to smile back. She pressed her lips together until the impulse died. “If you so much as breathe on my notes—”

“I won’t touch them,” he said, and his voice had gone steady again. “I meant what I said.” He hesitated. “I’ll give you quiet. I’ll give you space. You can keep your side like a chapel and I’ll keep mine like a stable, but a tidy one.” He lifted a shoulder. “We don’t have to like it. We just have to agree.”

She listened—past his words to the scrape of sleet, the hollow of the room, the way the fire’s heat was already being leached by the cold. Her objection rose in her like tide. She grabbed it with both hands.

“I don’t want to share this cabin with you,” she said plainly. “I don’t want your noise, or your presence, or your—” Her gaze dipped before she could catch it—his mouth, the line of his throat—“everything. I want the quiet I paid for. I want to hear only the wind and the kettle and the pages of my own work. I don’t want to be aware of you every time I breathe.”

Silence spread wide between them. He took it without flinching. When he spoke, his voice was even. “All right.” He nodded once, as if acknowledging the force of what she’d said. “You don’t want this. I get it.” He gestured to the couch. “I’m still not going to die in a drift to make that happen.”

She stared at him, at the line, at the door. The door might as well have been a cliff edge.

He picked up his duffel again, moved it further toward the far wall, as if that extra foot could buy her back what she had lost. “I’ll stay out of your way,” he said. “You won’t have to be aware of me.”

The lie was gentle and transparent. She felt it anyway.

“You already are,” she said, barely above the hum of the dying kettle. Then, louder, with the steel she knew how to use. “This doesn’t mean anything. It’s circumstances. As soon as Alec finds another place, you’re gone.”

His eyes warmed, then cooled to something respectful. “As soon as he does,” he agreed, matching her tone, not her denial. “Until then, I’ll keep to my side.”

“Good,” she said, though nothing about this felt good. She turned back to her binders and willed the room to shrink back into shapes she could control.

Behind her, he moved with quiet efficiency—duffel unzipped, jacket folded, boots aligned along the baseboard, as if he had heard every rule in her voice that she hadn’t said aloud. He laid a spare blanket over the couch and tested the cushion with his palm. The fire gave a soft snap. The chalk line lay between them, bright and absurd.

He took an oatcake and ate it standing, not a crumb dropped. When he spoke again, it was from his side, careful. “If you need more wood, tell me.”

“I won’t,” she said, but she knew she would. The storm was coming. The room tightened and held. He kept his distance, and still she felt him, a pressure at the edge of her senses, as infuriating and inescapable as the weather.

The hour with Alec on speaker had been a looped apology. The roads were closing. The inn was full to the rafters with festival-goers who had beaten the weather by a day. A shepherd up the glen had a bothy with no heat and a door that didn’t close. Alec swore he would fix it when the weather cleared, kept tripping over his own guilt until Elara told him to stop.

When the call ended, the room fell into a strange quiet. Snow clicked against the windows. The last of the daylight had drained to iron. Her phone showed a radar map smeared in angry blue. Every alternative she’d pressed for had collapsed under something practical: distance, danger, an already-occupied bed. Her lists didn’t have a column for force majeure.

Julian stood with his hands hooked in his back pockets, watching her without pressing. The angle of his shoulders said he was braced for another fight. Tiredness moved through her like a slow tide. She could push until her voice went hoarse and still be stuck with the same choice.

She closed her binder with a whisper. “Fine,” she said, the word small and precise, like a cut. “We’ll do it your way. Temporarily.”

“My way is not dying in a barn,” he said gently. Then, softer: “Thank you.”

“Don’t.” She held up a hand. “Ground rules.”

He nodded, the motion almost formal. She went to the sideboard and opened the shallow drawer. The stub of a carpenter’s chalk lay beside a rusted key. She took the chalk, and the simple, childish act of it steadied her.

She crouched and drew the line. It started at the hearthstones and ran straight as she could make it to the far wall, cutting the small living room cleanly in two. The chalk scraped against the planks, a rough, definite sound. When she stood, the line sat between them like a contract.

“This is mine,” she said, indicating the side with the table and her binders. “Work zone. No encroaching.” She pointed to the other side, the couch sunk in tired surrender. “That’s yours. You sleep there. You keep your gear contained. You cook after I’m finished for the day, and you clean every surface you use. We coordinate bathroom times. We don’t talk unless it’s about logistics or safety.”

A corner of his mouth tipped, not quite humor. “No humming,” he added, a reminder.

“No humming,” she confirmed. “And no music without headphones.”

He glanced at the couch, tested the springs again with his palm like a man reckoning with a fate he had chosen. “I’ll take the couch. Obviously.”

She hated how relief brushed through her. “Obviously.”

“Blankets?” he asked, matter-of-fact. “If we lose power, I’ll need extras.”

She gestured toward the cedar chest under the window. “In there. Take two.”

He moved along his side of the line, careful, as if the chalk could burn. He lifted the lid of the chest and the smell of wood and lavender rose, old and clean. He took two wool blankets and shook them out with a soft thud. The couch received them without complaint. He added his own sleeping bag to the mix, unzipping it to make a makeshift cover. He tucked the edges with brisk, competent hands, as if making a bed in a moving tent.

Elara stacked another log in the fireplace. The flames jumped, casting him in warmer light. He didn’t look up. He aligned his boots under the couch, set his duffel against the far wall, and lined his gadgets—drone controller, headlamp, field notebook—on the low table like offerings. Everything stayed on his side. He was taking her rules and building himself into them.

The kettle rattled to a boil. She made tea because it was what she did when choices had to be swallowed. She set one mug on the very edge of the chalk line, handle turned toward him. He looked at it, then at her, as if confirming she meant to offer it without the mess of gratitude.

“Truce tea?” he asked, voice mild.

“Don’t name it,” she said, though the corner of her mouth betrayed her for a breath before she snapped it back into place. “It’s hot water with a purpose.”

He took the mug and cradled it, the steam rising to blur the outline of his face for a second. “To parameters,” he said, almost under his breath.

She sat at her table. The house settled, letting out tiny complaints as the wind drove at its bones. The chalk line glowed faint as frost. She took comfort in its straightness, even as the absurdity of it pressed at her pride. They were two grown professionals drawing a boundary like children splitting a backseat. The awareness made her shoulders tighten, then drop. It would get them through tonight.

He cleared his throat. “What time do you want for the bathroom?” It was a ridiculous question, and somehow exactly right.

She checked the clock. “Ten-minute shower at seven each morning,” she said. “I go first. Evenings, after I finish work. Thirty minutes.” She heard herself and wanted to laugh and didn’t. “You?”

“I’m flexible,” he said. “I can wash up at the sink and use the kettle if the water goes cold. I’ve done worse.” He looked at her hands, where her fingers smoothed the edge of a tab until the paper warmed. “I’ll make sure there’s wood. I’ll keep the fire going when you sleep.”

“I can manage,” she said automatically. But he was already pulling on his jacket.

“You can,” he agreed. “But I’m going outside anyway. Better now than when the drift buries the stack.”

He took the back door, slipping through with the deftness of someone used to measuring himself against weather. Cold slapped into the room and then the door cut it off. She watched the shadow of him move past the window, a bulk against the whirling white, then vanish into it.

While he was gone, she adjusted the lamp, lined her pens, told herself to breathe. The fire whispered. The chalk line waited. The cabin, small before, had found a way to feel smaller and larger at once—a box with a storm pressing on all sides that somehow held two separate planets swirling inside it.

He came back snow-dusted and flushed, his hair damp at the edges, the sleeves of his sweater pushed up as if he’d forgotten the cold in favor of the work. He stamped his boots clean and left them by the door, stepping out in thick socks, careful to keep them on his side. He shook the extra powder from his jacket in the entry and hung it on a peg. When he crossed back to the couch, he looked at the line and then at her, as if asking whether the rules extended to breath.

She inclined her head. He eased himself onto the lumpy cushions and tested his new kingdom with a tiny wince that he smoothed over quickly.

The storm found its voice, a low, persistent moan through the eaves. The lights flickered once, twice, then held. The sound made the chalk line feel both more reasonable and more fragile. She considered what Alec had said—two nights, three at most, then the roads would open, then rooms would free up, then this experiment in enforced civility could end.

Julian laid back, one arm folded behind his head, careful not to sprawl. He stared up at the ceiling and then over at the fire. “If the power goes,” he said, “we’ll consolidate food on the cold side of the porch. Less spoilage. I’ll handle it.”

“Fine,” she said. The edges of her voice were softening against her will. “I’ll note where the perishables are.”

He nodded. A beat of silence stretched, thin and real. He cleared his throat again, almost shy. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, Elara.”

She stiffened. “For your… presence?”

“For the mess this is,” he said. “Not for being here. But for how it wrecked your plan.”

Her chest tightened at the accuracy. She set her mug down carefully. “Apology noted.” Another beat. “This is the arrangement. It will hold.”

“It will,” he said, without irony. He lifted the blanket and pulled it over himself, settling into an awkward approximation of restfulness. “Goodnight to your side,” he added, low, a courtesy more than warmth.

She almost didn’t answer. Then she did, matching his tone. “Goodnight to yours.”

They worked at not making noise in a room that recorded every sound—the turn of a page, the sigh of ancient floorboards, the soft hitch and settle of someone adjusting on a bad couch. The line did not blur. It didn’t fix anything, either. It just sat there, chalk-dry and honest.

When the lights flickered again and failed, the fire took over entirely, throwing their halves into moving amber. Elara reached for the matches and lit the second candle she’d placed in readiness. Across the room, the couch creaked as Julian shifted, pulling the blanket to his shoulder. Through the sheet of weather, the Highlands roared and hushed, a living thing.

The truce held because it had to. She breathed in, out, and watched shadows dance across the line like they were trying it for weak spots and finding none. For now, that would have to be enough.