When Snow Sealed the Cabin

ACT 1 — THE SETUP MARA The first flakes arrived like punctuation marks—soft, clean, deliberate. They blurred the pines beyond the cabin windows into a watercolor of white and shadow, every gust rewriting the world. I pulled my coat tighter and watched them through the small pane by the sink, listening to the house settle around me. The heater coughed in intermittent bursts, as if it had been startled awake; the kettle on the stove ticked and hissed, impatient. There was a comfort in these ordinary noises, in the domestic choreography of a place that belonged to no one but me for a few days. I had booked the cabin with the precise intention of dissolving. Not literally—of course I hadn’t. But there had been a seam in me for months: the quiet aftermath of a marriage that had grown polite and tentative, the scraping of routines that no longer fit. I came with a suitcase of notebooks and a dull ache for solitude, hoping that the thin winter air would make my sentences sharper. I remember the road as a strip of gray ribbon I had misjudged. The GPS routed me down a lane narrower than I expected, one lane that felt less like a road and more like an idea of a road. My phone lost bars somewhere after the last mile; I should have felt panic then, but instead I felt an odd, stubborn curiosity. The first time I saw the cabin it was peeking between trunks, lights like a lantern winked into the snow. It looked illustrated—too perfect to be useful. I’d parked, pulled a sweater over my pajamas, and thought for the briefest second about the people who’d once made a place like this their island of weekends. He arrived with a shovel. He carried it like it was nothing, like he’d been doing this his whole life. I watched him because there was nothing else to watch. He was taller than I’d expected from the photograph on the rental page—broad-shouldered, hair the color of late autumn wheat, the stubble on his jaw catching the light like someone had etched it by hand. There was a practical, workmanlike set to him: the way his jacket hung, the way his hands were both large and deft. He moved with a certainty I’d missed in myself lately. I felt the first hot prickle of awareness in my chest and told myself not to be ridiculous. We both paused at the doorway; then he lifted his gaze and the world narrowed to the distance between his eyes and mine. The immediate thing was not handsome, or the slope of his mouth; it was recognition—an animal openness that didn’t ask permission. He smiled in a way that softened his face and, absurdly, the cabin’s light seemed brighter. “You lost?” he asked. His voice was low, not loud enough to be a shout against the wind, but perfectly pitched for conversation in a small room. I laughed because it was the only answer I trusted. “Not lost. Detoured,” I said, and noticed he liked the word as much as I did. He introduced himself—Alex—and in the sentence that followed a map of his life unfurled without fanfare: handyman for the owner, lives in the valley, comes up when the weather turns. He had a key the size of a small sword and a laugh that tasted like cedar smoke. He offered me help shoveling so my car wouldn’t be swallowed by the drift; I declined, though every muscle in me wanted to accept the excuse to move toward him. Instead I made tea, the kettle sounding like a small argument between my domesticated plans and the storm. There was a pocket of hesitation after we closed the door on the night. The electricity tremored, flickered, and went out—the house exhaled into darkness. Alex’s hand met the flashlight on the counter; his fingers brushed mine and the contact was nothing and everything. He found the fireplace and began the business of coaxing flame from damp wood with the kind of patience you’d expect to see in someone who kept bees. As the fire grew, it threw warmth and tiger-stripe light over his cheekbones, and something in me loosened its grip on the past. We traded stories like people who save up small, unlikely confessions for when the right listener appears. I told him about the unfinished story that had brought me here—about paragraphs that felt like unsaid apologies. He told me, modestly, about repairing roofs and the satisfaction of a job that ends with a straight line. He had a daughter somewhere in the valley, he said briefly, and the mention of her made him softer for a second. I told him about the marriage and the quiet exit; he listened without following me into the cheap sanctimony of advice. He didn’t try to fix me—that was new. When he leaned too close to check the stove, his breath nudged the back of my ear. The contact was negligible in degrees, enormous in consequence. I understood it for what it was: the first tilting of the world. We ate takeout over the table light—no small craft, but comfort food that matched the mood—and the storm announced itself as though to test the cabin’s loyalty. Wind rattled the shutters; snow pounded the eaves like an impatient visitor. By the time we slid into a quiet, comfortable silence and the bottle of wine had loosened our edges, I recognized that the snow had done me a favor I hadn’t invited: it had stopped the world from letting me run away. A seed had been planted: his name, his hands, the simple geometry of his face. It was ridiculous, premature, and delicious. The kind of thing that becomes a memory and then a story. ALEX From the valley, storms were business. They were measured in hours of shoveling, in the geometry of plows on country roads, in the calculation of how one door shut would make another open for the folks you could rely on. I wasn’t a sentimental man by trade. I fixed things. I measured twice and cut once. My life ran on a ledger of projects—barn roofs, crushed driveways, an occasional railing—and the child who called me dad every night to say something that sent my day spinning back into color. The rental cabin was one of those regulars: a place that needed someone to come up in heavy weather, to read the footings and the roofline and know what the storm might do before it did it. On a day like that the roads were wrong-colored, and the sky was a kind of tired blue that hurt your eyes. I left the truck with a shovel and a thermos and my keys, thinking all the practical things you think when a place like that needs you. I found a woman on the porch with a suitcase bigger than she was, hair loose, eyes doing that thing where they studied every plane of my face as if she were an editor making a margin note. She had a look that made me want to take my time: city-bred certainty that had softened into curiosity. She smelled faintly of citrus and something like old book glue—an oddly specific smell, the kind I could picture under a lamplight. She introduced herself as Mara and said she was here to write. It was a short confession and soon she was in the house making tea while I painted the world with small, useful actions: shoveling, breaking ice in the gutters, checking seals. I wanted to tell her about the valley, about the roads that learned to keep secrets of their own, but I didn’t, because sometimes the important thing is to listen to the sound of someone arriving. I carried my shovel knowing a storm could mean being stuck for a while. Maybe it was the way she lit the fire with careful, precise movements, or the way her jaw curved when she read something aloud from her notebook, but I felt the kind of attentiveness that often precedes trouble. There was an ease about her that made me less defensive. She had sadness braided into her sentences, but she kept a sharp, dark humor nearby, as if she’d learned to season grief with it. When the power died, I found myself wanting to stay. Not out of obligation; out of a primitive, human calculation: this woman in my house, with her misaligned suitcase and the arrangement of her mouth, was a vessel of possible kindness. I’m not given to grand gestures, but when her fingers brushed mine by the flashlight I felt something start. I made coffee, I coaxed the fire with an artisan’s patience, and I watched her in the flicker-light like a man who’d studied portraits too long and finally got sick of the stillness. We traded things nobody asks for by way of greeting—book recommendations, the humiliation of a first job, the soft detail that makes you a person and not a label. She told me—briefly—about a marriage that had turned into a polite, compatible silence. I told her about being a father and the rare, heavy tenderness it brought me. She listened to the word daughter in me as if it were a bell that needed to be set carefully on the hearth. There was a moment when the world shrank to the sound of our chairs moving in the same rhythm, the bottle of wine between us like an old friend. Then our breaths synchronized, not because we wanted them to, but because fireplace heat and the smallness of the room made choreography inevitable. When she tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, her finger left a pale line of fever on my forearm. She looked at me then, not as a stranger but as someone who might occupy an unexpected, desirable place in a life. I had plans for the night—a list that included small repairs and the satisfaction of a job finished—but none of them mattered when she stood and moved toward the window to watch the storm. I remember thinking, with an odd, irrational clarity, that being stuck in a cabin with her could be the kind of detour that realigned everything. We were both nervous about the not-yet. The night seemed careful, as if it could hear us thinking aloud. The first look we gave each other carried a promise we hadn’t spoken: we would be cautious, we would be bold, we would be honest. The snow had a way of framing the world, of separating things into sharper focus. In that light, everything about her looked inevitable. ACT 2 — RISING TENSION MARA In the morning the storm was still at its business, not finished but working steadily. The bed was a nest of flannel and laundry, a harmless chaos that smelled of cedar smoke. I woke with Alex’s profile in my head, the slope of his nose, the way his forehead creased when thinking. There was a knowledge in me as palpable as the warmth under the duvet: that this was a place where I could let go of the polite guard I’d worn for months. The thought was almost obscene in its intimacy, and I smiled into the pillow because it felt like looking at the sun from behind a tree. We fell into a rhythm that felt improvised and perfectly timed. I made coffee while he chopped wood. He fixed a loose step on the porch while I brewed. We were accidental choreography—two people filling the same empty spaces. There were moments that could have been tender and stayed practical. I remember handing him a hammer and our palms meeting—callused, warm—like the punctuation of a sentence. He laughed at something I said and leaned close to hear me better; his shoulder brushed mine and the simple physics of the touch made my breath hitch. The day contained a sequence of small combustions: his fingers catching mine over a pot lid, his kiss of concentration as he read the face of a stubborn screw. The cabin felt like an island that had been constructed specifically to trap two people who’d been walking toward different destinies. We spent the afternoon talking in a way that felt like excavation. We were both careful about the raw spots—her wounds, his responsibilities—until the moments we weren’t careful became the most honest. He told me about his ex-wife and the arrangement that left him a different kind of single: not free in the way my divorce pretended, but tethered by visitation schedules and mortgage payments. He had a patience with the small details of another life I hadn’t known I missed. I told him about the way the last years of my marriage had felt like reading the same paragraph so many times that the words lost their meaning. There was a particular near-miss that might have been inscrutable in another novel: a dropped mitten. I picked it up, and he reached for it at the same time. Our hands clasped the mitten, then lingered in a sort of spatial conversation. The deliberate, slow movement of it was intimate: the way our fingers threaded over a woolen weave, the warmth of his skin against mine. The sky was a soft, indifferent white, and the air smelled like wet cedar and pine resin. He said, half-joke, half-truth, "You make this look like the right kind of wrong." I said nothing because the correct response would have been too heavy. Instead I leaned on the banister and felt my pulse steady in an odd triumph. We were both circling the edges of what we could say aloud. We were both reluctant to let go of the island of civility. That night we drank too much wine and played a game of cards by the fireplace that felt like another kind of duet. The batteries in my phone were low and meaningless; the world outside was a muffled drum. We stood near the hearth to warm our hands, and our bodies found a language of inches. Once, his lips brushed my temple while laughing at a stupid card joker; once he placed the back of his hand against my cheek the way a person might steady a photograph destined for a frame. I felt the edges of a line I was not sure I wanted to cross. We were interrupted twice that evening. The first interruption was practical: a storm-cleared path of worry. Alex’s phone vibrated—work, or a parent, or a rope he could not ignore. He stepped outside for ten minutes and came back apologetic, stoic. He said it was nothing. The second interruption was an internal one: a memory of the first time I had let someone in and how fragile that had been. I imagined it as a picture: my wedding dress, the curl of my hand around a wineglass, the small look in someone’s eyes that had meant more for me than for them. That image made me hesitate. There it was, the thorn that pricked: I did not want to be the kind of woman who jumped into warm arms because the storm asked her to. But there were other things gaining weight inside me: the ease in his laugh, the way he made me feel like an accomplice to something secret and tender. I started to catalog his small, private acts for future memory: the hum of his voice when he read aloud, the way he folded his hands when he listened. Attraction is never only physical; in him it included these small fixtures of decency. ALEX I’d been a man of small certainties: fix the roof, check the foundation, keep the child on time. Mara complicated that calculus in the best possible way. She wasn’t demanding drama; she was a quiet storm herself, a person who had learned to carry a lot in a small carriage. Watching her move through the cabin—stirring jam, folding a towel—was more intoxicating than any deliberate seduction. It was the tiny, unassuming brilliance of someone who lived inwardly. I found myself wanting to be useful not because I needed to show value but because there was pleasure in seeing her react to the world. She would show me a passage she’d written aloud and the revelation in her voice when a phrase landed right—there was something about the shape of her mouth when a sentence worked that made me want to trace it. I wanted to tiptoe the thin line between help and presence. We had a handful of near-misses that each felt like a test. Once, she stepped back to retrieve a notebook from the shelf and nearly stumbled; I grabbed the small of her back. It was an ordinary rescue, and yet the way she exhaled into my palm made something in me ache. Another time, a snowdrift shifted and we were outside, shoulder to shoulder at the porch, breathing steam and watching sunlight try to push through the flurries. She rested her hand on the wooden rail and her fingers splayed as if to map the grain. I felt jealous—not of a person but of the wood itself, which held the warmth of her hands before me. There were interruptions—attempts to keep distance—because both of us had reasons to be slow. Her history with married commitment made me wary of being a quick replacement for something else. My daughter needed me, and I could not be the kind of person who promised what I could not deliver. We both tried, in various clumsy, earnest ways, to be honest around edges. She asked me about my ex-wife and said her name like it was a test; I replied with the same honest, blunt grammar I used for roofs and screwdrivers. We were attempting to build something that resulted from truth rather than fantasy. Even so, the attraction slid into the corners of our day, unbidden and insistent. There was a charged silence the afternoon she found an old Polaroid behind a stack of books—a picture of me and my daughter at a lake, hair blown to strings by the wind. She handled it like an archaeologist and then looked up at me as if she’d measured me by that snapshot and found me worthy. Her gaze held a hundred unasked questions, and in that moment I wanted to answer them all. The sexual tension was a steady undertow. It was in the way she dipped her head to read her pages aloud, in the brush of her thigh against mine when we sat too close by the fire, in the way she nibbled the inside of her cheek when frustrated. It was in how she smelled—citrus in the hair, faint smoke on her clothes, a trace of her own perfume that pulled me like a familiar song. We had conversations that were dangerous because they were too easy. She asked me what I missed. I told her—my daughter, the messy, perfect chaos of parent life that you either swallowed or you didn’t. She asked about love and the slow death of routine. The room was full of small echoes, the possibility of two people acknowledging that maybe they’d been traveling with one hand tied behind their back, and it felt both pathetic and marvelous. That night, after another careless near-kiss averted by the stupid statistical likelihood of the floorboard creaking, I told myself to be brave. The cabin seemed to hold its breath. The fire spit and settled and the world outside turned itself into a white tomb. When Mara moved closer, it was as if the air between us narrowed deliberately, so that there was no room for pretense. It felt like walking along the ridge of a mountain: at once terrifying and beautiful. MARA The second storm night took on a private mythology. We had a small dinner of bread warmed over coals and cheese that squeaked with the right sort of bite. We spoke of things that felt like confessions: bad habits, the way we both kept our favorite songs secret. I told Alex about the first time I fell in love in Paris and how the light there had spoiled me for all other light; he told me about a barbecue where everything misfired but the dessert was right in the end. We traded stories like people who lay out maps to help the other find a way back home. At some point he reached for my hand. There was no fireworks, no Hollywood gesture—just a slow, deliberate closing of the distance. He said softly, "Do you want to know something dangerous?" I looked at him, not because I assumed he was an oracle, but because I wanted what he might say to be true. "Yes," I admitted. He smiled that sideways, private smile and said, "I like you. More than I should." There are compass points in life that rearrange the map. His admission was one of those points. It did something small and seismic in my chest. I felt both the immediate heat of the admission and the cold, long history of my caution. I wanted to say yes and mean it and mean it for future days too, but the word was enormous. "I like you, too," I said, and it felt strangely honest. There was an ache threaded in it—like a good chord that resolves with both brightness and melancholy. We lingered there, on the edge of something delicious, until the cabin’s small thermostat of a life—our composed selves—got in the way. More obstacles followed: a text that came through on Alex’s phone at dawn, an apology that he left it on the table with half the meaning missing; a call that required his attention, a child’s voice breaking into the adult weather of the night. We were both forced into a kind of practical adulting that belied the private promise of what the other might yet mean. It was a strange, cruel balancing act: the world demanded mundane duties even as our bodies voted otherwise. Those interruptions made the desire heavier. It was no longer a bright thing; it was a weight that pressed on my sternum until I could not think straight. I began to measure out the hours like a miser counting coins, saving them for a moment when the world would allow us to be unmoored. ALEX I could have left. I had the responsibility, yes, and the sense of steady projects to return to, but the rational part of me was not the part that mattered at that moment. There was a woman in my cabin whose laugh could soften my shoulders. There was a way her mouth moved over certain consonants that convinced me we were abandoning a caution worth keeping. I found myself making decisions that would, in my better life, have counted as reckless. I wanted to kiss her badly enough that it hurt. The night the wind fell asleep and the house creaked into a friendly hum, she stood by the sink and read backward through her pages to find a line she’d liked. The movement was intimate and private and I wanted to be part of it. I moved sideways and placed my hand on the small of her back. It felt like coming home to a room I’d never visited but already knew the furniture of. We were careful for a while. We kissed in patches—short, indefinite, rehearsing the contours of wanting. Then we kissed as if it were weather: something that arrived and demanded all attention. I remember the heat in her when I pushed myself closer, the way she tasted faintly of citrus and red wine, the tiny, stunned silence that arrived as we realized we’d crossed a line we had both been tiptoeing toward. There were so many small stages to the giving-in: removing gloves slowly, running fingers along sleeve hems, the playful tug of a scarf that turned into a hand at the nape of a neck. Clothes came off as if shed by reluctant trees in spring: tentative at first, then eager, then absolutely necessary. Every uncovered skin was a geography to be learned: the soft hollow beneath a collarbone, the freckles that crowded at the shoulder like a secret constellation. I wanted to catalog everything. But there were ruptures waiting to remind us we were not only two people in a bubble. A call from his sister; a voicemail left on my phone from an editor wanting a deadline. Details of responsibility tugged at the edges of the night. Even in those raw moments, every interruption became part of the narrative we were creating together—another obstacle we'd navigated and survived. MARA When he finally laid me down on the throw rug by the hearth, the world narrowed to brimstone and oxygen. The small stitches of my body came undone. He kissed me like he was reading me aloud for the first time: slowly, aloud, tasting for meaning. His kisses traveled with intention down my throat, mapped the slope of my waist, and I answered in kind, as if the language of desire was as integral as my ability to breathe. We moved like people who had agreed to tell the truth but hadn’t decided on the grammar. His hands were curious and tender in a measure that felt startling. He found my wrists and traced the map of my veins like someone memorizing the architecture of a town. I felt all the small alarms and old hesitations settle into something that was not a surrender but a trade—my walls for his steadiness. Sex with Alex was a lesson in attentive tempo. He paid attention to the heat of a shoulder, the catch in my breath, the way my hands wanted to hold and not be judged. There are lovers who move with the arrogance of discovery; then there are those who move as though they have been keeping a light on for you. He fit in the latter category. He had the patience to watch me arrive rather than the need to make me arrive first. That attention, more than technique, broke me open. We explored like two people learning a new language—Alexander where I had been a desert, I where he had been rocky earth. There were moments of hard, urgent need that slid into exquisite slowness, minutes that were purely tactile and minutes that were filled with the smallest confessions. He whispered things at my ear—fragments of what he wanted, and what he didn’t—and I told him the same. The conversation between our bodies moved from small curiosity to the enormous, comfortable thing of two people making a place for each other. We drifted through positions like a choreographer improvising a duet. I wanted to remember every second—the way the fireplace light made his eyes burn amber, how his voice raked me back into reality with small, tender encouragements. I felt him with a clarity that put the past in a softer frame: the years that had led me to this single room and the sharp relief of it all dissolving. There was a point where we paused, both of us braiding the quiet heavy around us. I ran my fingers along the grain of his back and felt the line of toil and tenderness there. "Are you—" I started, and the question was simpler and more dangerous than either of us anticipated. He answered by kissing me like prayer. ACT 3 — THE CLIMAX & RESOLUTION ALEX We had spent a long time making our way to the center of each other—less an arrival than an unwinding. The physical was a language we’d both been literate in, but the emotional notes were what made the moment crackle. There was a point when everything else in me—the measured man who fixed roofs and balanced schedules—fell away and the only calculus that mattered was: be present. I remember the way she smelled then—an intoxicant that mixed citrus, wood smoke, and something that was purely her. I remember the sound she made when the room shifted and she understood invitation. My hands learned the map of her ribs, the slope of her hip, the nape of her neck. She responded to the smallest attentions—slow fingers at the base of her throat, a particular focus at the point where the collarbone softened and the skin thinned. We moved together like people who’d finally stopped strategizing. There was a softness to everything we did: the way I cupped her jaw between my fingers and watched wonder spread across her face; the way she threaded her fingers into my hair, as if to anchor me against drifting. Our rhythm rose and fell not as a competition but as an unfolding. There were moments that seemed invented just to make memory richer. I brought her to the edge of something with a tenderness I’d practiced by reading instruction manuals in solitude—deliberate, careful—and then let her fall back into me like a tide. When she laughed into my mouth for the first time, something enormous in me unclenched. The sound was part joy, part shock: the joyous recognition that my life could hold this surprise, the shock that it had taken so long to happen. We moved into deeper places of touch: certain angles, certain pressures that sent replies of breath and movement back up my spine. I loved how generous she was—how she wanted to make the other part of it as good as possible. She guided me sometimes, her voice husky with effort and pleasure: "A little softer, there," or, "Don’t stop." Between thrusts we traded secrets in near-whispers, the kind that sounded shapely in the dark and held weight when the cold outside made the cabin an island. I told her not about the roofs I fixed but about the small, ridiculous fears I kept—about being enough. She told me small luminous things: that she’d once bought a typewriter because she wanted the click to feel like a companion. The tiny, ridiculous intimacy of those two admissions was like splinting a broken bone—practical and a little miraculous. At one point she reached for me with an urgency that made me remember what desire did when it was unencumbered by the last sixty minutes of thought. I let her lead, and she moved atop me with a grace that felt like permission granted and reciprocated. Our bodies fit and misfit and re-fit; we learned each curve by contact and the mistakes were as tender as the triumphs. There were hushes that felt like small wars and there's that are peaceful capitulations. The clasped moments before and after the peak were as sacred as the peak itself. She cried out—a single, sharp note that made the wood of the old floorboard seem to answer—and I felt triumphant in a way that had nothing to do with conquest and everything to do with mutual creation. We came together, not the fireworks-annihilation of movies but a long, patient crescendo that was both release and commencement. Afterwards, she lay with her head on my chest and I listened to the steady, improbable professional rhythm of her breath. The fire had burned low; the room smelled of smoke and sweat and the turn of something new. My hands moved in loops on the small of her back like a man brushing off snow. She moved her chin up and looked at me—eyes rimmed red from sleep or exertion—and said the only thing that needed saying: "Stay." It was not a demand. It was an invitation. It was everything. MARA I expected the after to be delicate and awkward, a nervous comedy. Instead it was luminous. We lay in the quiet that followed with limbs tangled and the warm push and pull of our breathing. The world beyond the cabin existed as a rumor: someone would need a roof measured, deadlines would claw, a child would wake up somewhere and want a pancake now. But in that room the calendar was misprinted and the days heavy with invitation. He was still large and steady under me, and I felt in my chest a clarity that came from not being alone. I had forgotten the way skin could organize a woman better than therapy, more reliable than the lists I had made to remember how to be alone. It was not a cure—no single night could repair years of frayed intimacy—but it was the first honest thing in a long time. When I said, "Stay," it was the smallest, bravest sentence I had made in months. It contained within it a preposition of trust. I didn’t know if that trust would last beyond the thawing of the roads, but I meant it with an urgency that surprised me. He answered by tightening his arms around me and kissing the top of my head. We rose at an ungodly hour to feed the little leftover fire and slice the last of the bread. The morning was acted like an after-party—tired and sober and very alive. We packed, slowly, with the economy of lovers who have had the gift of time. There were small gestures that deepened what had happened: a folded shirt in the suitcase placed with the reverence reserved for a found thing; a note on the counter with a number and a sentence—"Call me when you want to be more than a detour." When we stepped outside the world had been folded into a bright white sheet. The road was passable now but still treacherous. We stood on the porch in a private, prolonged goodbye as if separation were another form of weather to be weathered. He kissed me once in a way that rearranged something permanent inside me: not an ending, but a hinge. Back in the valley he texted me in small, practical ways—an image of his daughter waving at a sunset; a question about a phrase I’d used that he wanted to keep; a note about a roof that needed a different shingle. It was the kind of thing that translated into life: steady, attentive, present. He was not theatrical about it. He was the patient maintenance man of human devotion, which suited me fine. We began, in the days that followed, to test this new thing against the small brutalities of life. He met me for coffee in a town halfway between our respective domiciles. I visited him when his daughter was with her mother and we cooked a dinner that tasted, collectively, like an experiment and a promise. There was awkwardness—of course there was—but there were also laughter and small salvations. We were a montage of small efforts: phone calls at midnight that were actual calls and not social lubricants, arriving early for appointments with gifts that were surprising in their calibration, a handwritten postcard wedged into a stack of bills. The sexual thing that had been so overwhelming in the storm was neither the entire point nor unimportant; it was the trust that had been placed like a small, glowing ember and now tended. On a quiet evening, in a house that smelled faintly of cedar and something that was now, happily, our shared life, he took my hand and said, "Remember the shore in that Paris story?" We were, both of us, making new sentences.