His Solitary Heart

The road narrowed until it was only a ribbon between black treelines. Elara’s rental car bumped over ruts packed with old frost, the GPS protesting in the empty stretch. She slowed when the iron gates appeared—tall, flaked with paint, their curls of metalwork clotted with snow. Beyond them, the manor rose against a low sky, a long dark shape with too many windows and steep roofs and chimneys like watchmen. It wasn’t welcoming. It didn’t need to be.

She parked and cut the engine. Silence dropped hard. Her breath clouded the windshield as she pressed her hands to the steering wheel, steadying herself against the old, familiar buzz that started under her skin when a project began. Blackwood’s library was a rumor with a budget attached—a task that could secure the promotion no one thought she’d reach by thirty. She was ready. She had lists. She had a plan.

The wind slipped under her collar when she stepped out. The air smelled like pine and cold stone. She hauled her suitcase to the steps and paused. From this angle, the windows gave back a diluted reflection of the gray sky. Her reflection in the glass looked small. She squared her shoulders and knocked.

The door opened before the third knock. A man filled the frame as if he’d grown up from the threshold itself. Tall, broad, worn-clean denim jacket open over a heavier sweater, boots scuffed, jaw shadowed with a day’s growth. His eyes were a temperate blue, cool and assessing. He did not smile.

“Delivery’s around back,” he said, voice low, like gravel rolled in a palm.

“I’m not a delivery,” Elara said, adjusting her grip on the handle of her suitcase. “Elara Maddox. University archives. We spoke—well, I spoke with Mr. Blackwood’s attorney.” She lifted the letter from her tote, the official seal catching what little light filtered through the cloud cover. “I’m here about the library.”

Those eyes flicked down to the paper, then up to her face again. Not impressed. “Right,” he said. “The cataloger.”

“Archivist,” she corrected, the word warmed slightly as it left her mouth. It was a habit she couldn’t break.

He stepped back, the move sparing, grudging. “I’m Liam.”

Just that. No last name. No welcome. She wheeled her suitcase over the threshold and into a foyer that smelled faintly of beeswax and old wood. The overhead light was off. Daylight seeped in through the tall narrow windows, finding dust and a small table with a porcelain dish for keys. Somewhere deeper in the house, something ticked.

“Coat hooks are there,” he said, nodding to a row of pegs. He watched her shed her coat like he was waiting to see whether she’d hang it properly. She did.

“I’d like to see the library first,” she said, softer now that the house held her voice. “If that’s possible.”

Liam said nothing for a beat. The pause stretched until she felt heat rise into her cheeks. He turned on his heel without warning. “This way.”

She followed him down a corridor lined with portraits that made her feel as if she were being measured. He moved with a quiet efficiency that made his size seem less threatening, not safer. A set of double doors opened under his hand, the hinges protesting. The room beyond drew the breath from her chest.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the walls, some bowed with the weight of leather bindings, some bare like missing teeth. A ladder on brass rails waited at one end. The air was heavy with paper and dust and a faint sweetness—old glue, perhaps. The tall windows along the far wall were dimmed by clouds, but the light that did make it in fell in long, pale bands across a central worktable. A map of Europe lay cracked under a sheet of glass. Elara stepped forward like she might sink.

“It’s… larger than I expected,” she said, because saying it was beautiful felt sentimental, and she had promised herself she would be professional.

“Yeah,” Liam said. He remained near the door, hands in his pockets. “No one’s had time to make a mess of it. Yet.”

She kept her back to him and pulled out her notebook, tucking her hair behind her ear. Her mind had already started its inventory—shelf runs, potential climate control issues, the state of the bindings, where to start. “I’ll need a workspace. The table is fine, but I’ll have to set up my laptop. I brought a humidistat for measurements.”

“No outlets in here that work,” he said. “Half the house is on old wiring. You can use the extension from the hall, if you don’t trip over it.”

Her pen paused. “I can work with that.”

“The heat stays off in rooms we don’t use. I’ll get you a space heater,” he said, as if the words hurt. “Don’t leave it unattended.”

He said nothing about the value of the collection or about how long she’d be here. She turned to face him, feeling the shape of the conversation forming before either of them had quite drawn it. “I won’t be in your way,” she said.

His mouth did a small, skeptical twist. “Everyone says that. Then they start moving things.”

“I move things carefully,” she said. She didn’t mean to let a smile slip, but it did, small and quick.

Something in his gaze flicked—interest, annoyance, she couldn’t tell. “Rooms upstairs. Pick one. Kitchen’s at the end of the other hall. Don’t go into the west wing. There’s scaffolding.”

“Understood.” She wrote it down anyway, as if she could make the parameters settle in her bones.

He watched the motion of her hand. “You’re here alone?”

She nodded. “The university couldn’t spare an assistant.” She realized only after she’d said it that she’d given him more than he’d asked for. She straightened. “I work better that way.”

He grunted. It could have been approval, could have been dismissal. “I keep the place running. I’m not a tour guide.” He pushed off the doorframe, and the room seemed to release. “If you need something, ask. If you break something, tell me. Preferably before I find it.”

“Noted,” she said. Their eyes met then, a long second that made her aware of the air between them. His were the color of lake water in shade. Her throat dried. She looked away first.

Liam’s boots sounded dull on the corridor’s runner as he left. The library door clicked closed with a weight that reminded her of a safe shutting. Alone, Elara pressed her palms to the worktable and let her breath move in and out until the tightness in her chest eased. The house had edges. So did its caretaker. Neither surprised her.

She opened her notebook to the first page, wrote Blackwood Library at the top, and underlined it. Then, in neat lines, she began her lists.

Elara set the leather-bound map aside and rolled up her sleeves. Dust rose in thin spirals as she pulled the first chair from the table. It was a practical ritual: establish a base, define a perimeter, make the unfamiliar feel like a task instead of a cathedral. She wiped the tabletop with a cloth from her tote, moving in steady, patient circles until the wood came through, dark and smooth. The air cooled as she worked, as if the house approved of brisk, quiet effort.

She tied her hair in a quick knot at her neck, set the humidistat on the far end of the table, then unzipped her laptop sleeve. The machine’s glossy black looked wrong here, but she needed it, needed the spreadsheet she had built on the train and the template for item descriptions. She found the outlet in the hall, trailed the extension cord in, and taped it down with blue painter’s tape. A ridiculous color in a room like this. It felt like drawing a line to claim a corner of sovereignty.

From somewhere across the house came a metallic thunk and the skitter of screws against wood. Liam. She had heard him move away, but his presence returned by sound as soon as he was out of sight. A hammer tapped three times, measured and uncompromising. It echoed down the corridor and settled in the bones of the woodwork, then in her shoulders.

She kept her gaze on her lists. Scope. Environmental variables. Shelf inventory by section. She wrote the headings in tidy script. The heater he’d left by the door whirred when she turned it on, the coil burning off old dust. A hammer again, then a low grind. It made her pulse jump before she could help it.

“Okay,” she said to herself, voice barely above breath. “Start small.”

She chose the nearest case: history, mid-eighteenth century, a row of cracked spines in shades of brown and green like river stones. She drew her finger lightly along the shelf edge to test for loose veneer, then lifted the first book. The leather was dry, but the stitching seemed sound. She recorded the title, author, condition. The familiar rhythm steadied her. She marked the position with a thin ribbon and moved to the next.

A door somewhere banged, and the sound rushed through the vaulted ceiling like a shout. She paused, her pen hovering, the number half-written. You’re a guest here, she reminded herself, and not wanted. The thought didn’t sting so much as it set her jaw. She had weathered worse. She had learned to fold herself into quiet spaces and work until the noise outside attenuated.

She stepped onto the ladder, fingers fitting comfortably around the sides. It rolled with a soft whisper. From a higher shelf, the room changed—more air, the tops of books, the pattern of light on the floor. She slid a volume free and carefully blew dust from its top. Her breath clouded, then cleared. The glass of the window fogged for a heartbeat where she’d exhaled toward it. Outside, the sky had shifted to a deeper gray.

Another sound: the steady sweep of a broom down the hall, the bristles rough against stone, then the scrape of something dragged into place. Liam was moving in and out of rooms, making order by force. His presence tugged at her attention. She tried to let it go. Failed, a little.

She carried three books to the table and arranged them like a sequence to be solved. Her laptop chimed as it found a weak signal, then lost it again. She ignored it. The humidistat ticked softly to itself. She opened a ledger with marbled endpapers and felt a small rush—two signatures on the title page, one dated 1799, the other 1904. Holdings like this were why she was here. She documented them with care, taking a second to steady the camera on her phone for reference images.

Liam’s voice rose, indistinct, then dropped. On a call? No. He was talking to himself, the way people who work with their hands narrate decisions. She caught only the cadence, the way it hummed under everything. It made the empty space of the house feel occupied, drawn taut between two people who didn’t yet share a language.

Her stomach tightened without warning. It had been hours since the coffee at the gas station. She checked her watch. Not hours—forty minutes. Time was different here, stretched thin by silence and tasks. She sipped from her water bottle and forced herself to sit. Sitting felt like a declaration—that she would not be chased from this table by a man’s disapproval or by the house’s age.

She worked. The clock on the mantel across the room, stopped at some forgotten hour, did not mark her progress, so she made her own marks: columns filled, small checkmarks by completed shelves. Each one pushed back against the pressure gathering at the base of her neck. She could picture her boss’s face when she returned with a complete inventory and photographs. She could hear her family’s questions about stability and timelines. They had been made manageable by bullet points. Now they were made manageable by the simple act of writing a catalogue number in a blank cell.

The heater clicked off, having reached its set temperature, and in the pause before it came on again, she heard Liam nearer. His boots thudded on the corridor runner, then the scrape of his palm over something rough. He stopped at the threshold. She looked up out of reflex, not quickly enough to seem eager, not slowly enough to seem indifferent.

He stood with a coiled extension cord over one shoulder and a box of outlet covers balanced on his hip. His gaze skimmed the table, the laptop, the tape he would probably hate. It flicked to her lists and paused there.

“You’ll trip yourself if you don’t angle that cord against the wall,” he said after a second.

“I taped it,” she said. Her voice came out more even than she felt. “Blue tape. No residue.”

One corner of his mouth hinted at a reaction—approval, maybe—but it was gone before she could name it. He nodded toward the shelves she’d started. “You’re not wasting time.”

“There’s a lot to do.” She tried for neutral. It sounded like a confession.

He made a low sound in his throat, neither complaint nor agreement. “Don’t lock that window if it sticks. I have to fix the frame before we start closing things up.”

“I won’t touch the windows,” she said. “Not without gloves.”

He looked at her hands, at the careful way she held the pen. For a breath, awareness stretched between them like a narrow bridge. Then he shifted the box in his arms. “Shout if the heater kicks a breaker. Panel’s in the cellar, and it’s a pain.”

She nodded. When he turned away, the room felt bigger and smaller at once. She listened to him go, to the house swallow his footsteps, and then lowered her head to her work again, pen moving, gentle with the spine of a book that had been here long before either of them. The air hummed with the sound of the heater and, farther off, the thud of a hammer setting a nail. She found her rhythm inside it, each entry a quiet promise to make sense of this place even if it refused to make sense of her.

The manuscript found her, not the other way around. It lay misfiled on a shelf of household ledgers, its vellum warped, its ribbon frayed to a pale thread. When she lifted the cover, the scent of iron gall ink and lavender sachet rose up like breath. Her fingers steadied. The hand was a tight, elegant script, the date 1763. It was not a ledger at all, but a private account: the first Blackwood’s reflections on the building of the manor, notes on masons and joiners, arguments with a brother over the angle of the stair. It was alive in a way that made her chest warm.

She set it carefully on a cradle of foam and adjusted the desk lamp to a gentler angle. The world narrowed to the arc of light, the dance of letters, the small thrill of recognizing a name that matched a half-erased signature inside a panel near the hearth. She worked in murmurs—translation, paraphrase, inventory numbers—her pen moving across her notebook with a speed she didn’t usually allow herself.

Outside, the gray pressed closer. She glanced up long enough to measure it—just weather, she told herself—and went back to the page. The windowpane rattled faintly when a gust hit it. The heater hummed. She turned a leaf between two sheets of tissue and frowned at a line about a hidden drawer in the map chest. Her heart stumbled, then righted. A faint smile tugged at her mouth. Secrets that were real were rarer than people thought.

Footsteps approached, heavier than before. She didn’t look up until the light of the doorway changed. Liam was there again, shoulder to the jamb, hair darker at the temples where melting snow had dampened it. He carried a bundle of salt bags in one hand and a knit cap in the other. The smell of cold air and wet wool followed him in.

“You see the sky?” he asked without preamble.

“Mm,” she said, eyes still on the curve of an f. “Clouds.”

He huffed, not exactly amusement. “Storm’s rolling in faster than the forecast said. If you want your car to be useful tomorrow, move it up by the carriage house. That rise stays a hair clearer.”

She reached for the next page before she finished with the first. “I will, in a bit.”

“Not a bit.” His voice was even, but there was a thread of insistence in it. “Now. Once it sticks, that lane turns into a chute.”

She finally looked up. Snow had started in earnest, slanting across the tall panes in loose, busy strokes. In the near courtyard, the first coat made the stones soft. Pretty, not dangerous. She tucked a ribbon into the book and smoothed it. “It’s not even covering the grass.”

He stared at her for a second longer than was comfortable. “It will. We’re a mile from the plow route. You’ll be digging yourself out alone if it drifts.”

“I won’t be,” she said lightly, and regretted the words when his mouth flattened.

“I won’t be babysitting your car either,” he said. No bite in it, just fact. “You came to work. Don’t turn the whole week into a rescue mission because you didn’t listen.”

The temper she kept folded small flickered. She closed the manuscript and placed both hands on either side of it. “I can handle a little snow.”

“Not like this.” His gaze flicked to her laptop, the cord, the blue tape. “You’re not from here.”

“I grew up in Wisconsin,” she said, sharper than she meant. “I do know what winter looks like.”

For a heartbeat, something like surprise, then calculation. He shifted the salt to his other hand. “Then you know it turns.” He nodded toward the window, where the flakes had thickened, heavy as feathers. “Five minutes.”

She could have stood, could have grabbed her coat and the keys and made a show of practicality. But the book’s weight under her palms tethered her. The thought of breaking the thread of her concentration for weather she had managed hundreds of times irritated her in a way that felt childish and also entirely reasonable. “I’m in the middle of something. I’ll go before it gets bad.”

He rubbed a hand over his jaw. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped. “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t tell you.” He backed away, pulled the door almost closed, then hesitated. “Don’t wedge it. The latch sticks when it swells.”

She nodded, and he left.

Silence settled again, but it was different now—a little keyed up, like the air before a performance. She breathed it in and let it out. The manuscript called her back, relentless in its quiet way. She reopened it and lost the next half hour to a drawing of the original banister, annotated in a margin with a complaint about a carver’s impatience. She copied it into her notes, sketching the curve with a careful hand. The storm outside gathered itself and pressed against the glass. Wind found a seam and whistled. She tucked her feet under her chair and kept writing.

The light shifted without her permission. When she lifted her head again, the world outside had gone soft and white. Snow ran like a steady hand over the grounds, already burying the low hedges along the path. The gravel lane had blurred into a blank strip. She stood, a pulse of unease low in her stomach, and leaned closer to the window. It wasn’t a curtain of flakes; it was a wall.

Her phone buzzed with a weather alert she couldn’t open without a signal. She checked the time. She’d let more than five minutes go. A little laugh escaped her, humorless and thin.

Her coat hung on the chairback. She grabbed it, slid her arms into the sleeves, and patted her pockets for keys she knew weren’t there, then found them on the table where she’d set them beside a bone folder. She took one last look at the book, the ribbon in its place. “Stay,” she said to it, ridiculous and fond.

In the hall, the house exhaled a draft against her knees. By the front door, the stained glass was gray with moving light. She wedged her hat on and opened the door a crack. The wind pushed back hard enough to make her stagger. Snow hit her face in small, wet needles.

She stood there, braced, staring out at the yard that was now a shifting, white sea, and realized she had waited too long. The car was a soft shape under a fast-growing curve. She could make it, she told herself. She just had to move fast. She took one step into the cold and felt the world narrow to breath and white and the decision she should have made when he told her to.

The cold took her breath first, then her balance. The step she meant to be decisive slid sideways; drifted snow swallowed her boot to the ankle. Wind pressed hard against her front, flattening her coat to her frame. She pushed into it anyway, head down, eyes stinging. The yard she had crossed earlier in two minutes stretched like a stadium. Her car was there—she could see the dark curve of the roof, the side mirror peeking like a stubborn ear—but the path between was a shifting, knee-high obstacle. Each step filled in behind her. It was like walking in place while the world hurried past.

She made it halfway before a gust shoved her sideways. Her foot slipped into an unseen hollow and sank to the calf. Snow poured into the top of her boot, a blunt, shocking cold that made her curse out loud. She yanked, ankle twisting, heartbeat a bright hammer in her throat. The mirrors of the car vanished as another wave of white washed over it. Her phone, useless in her pocket, hugged her thigh like a joke.

A shadow cut through the blur. She heard him before she saw him: his voice, short and sharp, borne to her on the wind. “Elara! Enough!”

She turned, blinded, hair whipping out from under her hat. Liam was a dark line against the doorway, then a moving shape, head down, a shovel slung over one shoulder, a rope coiled at his elbow. He waded toward her like he’d done it a hundred times, strong and methodical, the rope already unfurling. By the time she could form his name, he was in front of her. He wrapped the rope around her wrist without ceremony, tight enough to anchor but not hurt.

“Don’t fight it,” he said, leaning close so she could hear him. His breath was warm against her cheek for a second, a shock of human heat in the brutal air. “Backwards. Short steps.”

She obeyed. He took the strain, bracing, tugging, guiding her step by step out of the hole her panic had dug. Snow clawed at her knees; he held steady. When her foot came free, she stumbled into him out of sheer relief, hands fisting in the front of his coat. The solidity of him—broad chest, the rhythmic lift of his breath—was startling. He turned, keeping her close, and together they trudged toward the house.

By the time he slammed the door behind them, her face was numb, and her calves burned. The quiet hit like a cushion. Wind still snarled around the eaves, but the hall held a pocket of calm. She stayed pressed to the door for a second, panting, blinking hard against the drips slipping down her lashes.

Liam shrugged the rope loose from her wrist, his fingers quick and sure. “Stubborn,” he said, not unkindly. There was an assembly of reactions in his face—irritation, relief, something like resignation. Meltwater slid down his jaw and into his collar.

“I’m sorry,” she said, the words small and truthful. He looked down at her boot, then crouched and tugged the zipper down. Snow spilled onto the runner in a small avalanche. He said nothing, only held her ankle steady as she freed her foot. The bare skin above her sock prickled in the warm air. She felt absurdly exposed, and then even more so when his hand slid away and the warmth she hadn’t noticed he was giving her left with it.

“We’re done with outside,” he said, standing. “Whatever wasn’t moved isn’t going anywhere for a while.”

She glanced past him to the window beside the door. The world beyond was obliterated—just white and motion, no trees, no path, no horizon. Her car might as well have been buried in another century.

He followed her gaze. “It’ll drift over the hedges by morning.” He held out a towel from the rack and nudged another toward her chest. “Dry off. You’re shaking.”

“I’m fine,” she said, out of habit. The towel under her fingers told a different story. She rubbed her face until her skin stung and color crept back. Liam walked to the thermostat and touched the dial out of reflex. It gave a hollow click. He kept his hand there an extra beat, the line of his shoulders tightening.

The lights flickered. A small, collective quiet fell over the house, as if the walls were holding a breath. The lamps blinked once more and went dark. The heater’s hum stuttered and died.

Her chest sank. “No.”

He didn’t swear, didn’t even sigh. He crossed to the hallway closet, pulled out a bin, and set it on the bench. Inside were flashlights, candles, matches, the practical insurance policy of a man who had learned to expect the worst. He handed her a flashlight, clicked his on, and the narrow beams cut clean paths through the dim.

“Power’s gone,” he said. The words were level, but their weight was heavier than the wind outside. “Lines are old between here and town. The plows won’t be through until this stops, and even then…” He glanced toward the blank windows, then back to her. “We’re not going anywhere. Not tonight. Probably not tomorrow.”

She swallowed, the towel clutched against her coat. “How long is foreseeable?”

A corner of his mouth twitched in something that wasn’t quite humor. “Long enough you’ll be sick of me.” He stepped closer so he didn’t have to raise his voice. His eyes, in the flashlight’s arc, were a deep, steady gray. “We make a fire. We keep to one room. We don’t open exterior doors unless we have to. I’ve got water stored and enough food to keep us from eating the wallpaper.” He paused, the light catching on a drop of water tracking down from his hairline. “You warm?”

She nodded because she wanted to be brave. Her hands gave away the lie, trembling against the towel. He noticed; his gaze dipped, then rose. He reeled himself back into practical. “Boots off. Dry socks. Meet me in the hall. We’ll move the blankets.”

She stepped out of her boots, toes curling against the cold runner, and followed him. The flashlight made a tunnel of the corridor, the portraits on the walls sliding by like silent witnesses. In the main hall, the old hearth yawned dark. Liam knelt to stack kindling with the same focus he’d brought to the rope. His hands were rough and efficient, his movements measured. She knelt too, setting candles on the mantle, lining up matches, trying not to notice how easy it felt to fall into his rhythm.

When the first flame caught and licked upward, her breath eased. The fire’s glow crawled out from the grate and warmed the air between them. For a moment, when he leaned back to look at it, their shoulders brushed. Heat where fabric met fabric. A glance met at the edge of the candlelight and skittered away.

The wind pressed its palm flat against the windows. She listened to it and to his breathing and to the tiny pops in the hearth as the logs took. Fear slid into something smaller. She found her voice. “I should have listened.”

His exhale was half a laugh, half relief. “You shouldn’t need to know all my weather superstitions yet.” He reached for a blanket and handed it to her, the edge brushing her wrist. “You do now.”

She spread the blanket over the settee, felt the weave under her fingers, the residual cold giving way to warmth. He moved beside her, close enough that she could feel the anchor of his presence. The house, stripped of its modern conveniences, narrowed to this circle of light and the outline of him in it.

“We’re stranded,” he said, not to alarm, but to set a fact between them like a table. “We’ll manage.”

Her throat tightened, then loosened. She nodded, pulled the blanket closer, and looked at the fire. The blizzard hurled itself at the manor, relentless and faceless. Inside, a different weather gathered quietly, not named yet, but present in the way his hand brushed past hers to set another log, in the way he didn’t move away.