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uncomfortable. "Creative writing meets inability to hold a normal job."
    "Advertising's not normal?" I asked. Jill was normal. Jill was dull even if she was my sister.
    "I don't know. I took business, too, dual major. So it's like the sides of my brain fight."
    I stared at him. Seriously not time for jokes about schizophrenia, dude, I'm alone here with you . "Um. What?"
    He laughed, which didn't endear me to him, but went on. "Creative work uses the right side of the brain, intuitive, silly, playful side. Business uses the left, which is alarming and frightening and analytical and serious."
    I probably used that side. You get that way when your father alters your entire childhood in one week. Being playful and silly means taking a chance at blurting out something that will make everyone hate you.
    Rick worked for an advertising agency in Atlanta, one with a long name made up of partners' last names. He didn't seem any more interested in that than I was. His work was routine, or maybe he was just ready for a change. I would have listened, but he didn't talk about it.
    We went on talking like that as time crept by. I wasn't ready to try and let go of the day and neither was he. It was just conversation, less spicy than before, less direct disagreements and rudeness.
    The fire was almost out. I was getting really cold again, bundling into the afghan I'd taken off the back of the futon a while ago and wondering if the tiny bedroom I'd passed on the way to the bathroom had enough quilts to share because the afghan wasn't going to do it overnight unless we kept the fire going a lot hotter than it was now.
    I thought it was getting on toward ten but a glance at my phone showed two things – first, it was nearly midnight, and I wanted to get an early start in the morning, get back to my rental car as the sun came up and burned off the snow, and second, I had no signal anymore.
    That scared me enough to get up off the futon without thinking. It's all claustrophobia, really, the snow and now the fact that I couldn't communicate with anyone. I didn't really think Rick Barnes was going to murder me in my sleep. I just hated being trapped.
    "What's wrong?" he started, when the cabin-jarring crash came from outside.
     
     
     

Chapter 3
     
    Rick was still wearing his boots. He'd never taken them off. He was on his feet before the cabin stopped vibrating, before the light over the tiny kitchen table stopped swinging. He grabbed his coat from the rack by the door and was outside with a mega bright flashlight before I had even thrown off the afghan and started looking for my shoes.
    "Wait!" I shouted.
    Right. Because what I really wanted to do was run out into the freezing night after whatever had caused that.
    But that's what I did.
    Rick was outside laughing.
    OK, good. Great. Wonderful. My host had lost it. Something like a comet had just hit the cabin and he was laughing.
    "What was that?" I shouted. From where I stood, I could see a few other people from the circle of cabins coming out to investigate. For a few minutes the moonlit snow was full of was full of voices and shouted questions and answers. No one seemed upset like I was. My panic rode high in my throat, making me cough around it. The evident lack of concern from everybody else was just obnoxious. They were all acting like it was a party.
    I found Rick in the glow of porch lights and moonlight. "What was that?" I demanded. My stomach muscles were still shanking.
    "Where's your coat?" he asked.
    As if alerted to the cold, I started shivering.
    Rick said something rude and abrupt, but he was still laughing. He put an arm around me, tucking me against him, then called to the neighbors, "Best of all possible results!"
    Laugher, a few equally incomprehensible responses, and we were back inside.
    "Are you an idiot?" He plunked me down on the couch, knelt at my feet, took both my hands and started chaffing warmth back into them. "You can't do that. Hypothermia, frost bite, freezing