“I just wanted to say I’m glad you’re here.”
I looked at him. He meant it. That was the sharp thing — Roman had never once been difficult to read if you were actually paying attention, and I had always, against my better judgment, been paying attention.
“I’m going to need a day,” I told him.
He nodded once. “Take whatever you need.”
I gave myself the morning.
I went out early, before the group lessons started, and skied alone on one of the quieter runs. The cold was sharp and clean. The mountain didn’t care about my feelings, which I found deeply comforting. I pushed hard on the descent, let the speed empty my head, and by the time I rode the lift back up I had reached a simple, clarifying conclusion.
I was still in love with him.
I had been in love with him three years ago when I wrote that draft. I had been in love with him through eighteen months of silence. And standing sixty feet above Aspen in a chairlift with the sky enormous and blue above me, I could not locate a single good reason to keep that fact folded up in my drafts folder.
The second sharp moment came that afternoon.
The group had broken into smaller clusters — some skiing, some in the lodge’s library for a workshop. I was warming up at the fire in the side lounge when Roman came in, still in his ski gear, helmet under his arm, cheeks red from the cold.
He stopped when he saw me. Neither of us spoke for a second.
“I owe you something,” he said finally.
“You don’t owe me anything, Roman.”
“I left.” He crossed the room and sat in the chair across from me. Not close. Just present. “After that Christmas. I told myself it was the job, and it was, partly. But mostly I left because I didn’t know how to tell you that the whole weekend had stopped feeling like a favor somewhere around day one.”
The fire crackled. Outside the window, snow was starting again, soft and unhurried.
I felt something loosen in my chest. Something I’d been holding tight for a very long time.
“I have a draft,” I said.
He looked at me. “What?”
“A text. I wrote it the night we got back. I never sent it.” I pulled out my phone before I could think better of it. Opened the message. Turned the screen toward him.
He read it. I watched his face.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “You wrote this three years ago.”
“Yes.”
“Nadia.” He said my name again, and this time there was nothing careful about it. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, close enough now that I could see the snowmelt still damp at his hairline. “I wrote you a letter. In London. I never sent it either.”
I stared at him.
“A physical letter?”
“I know. I’m aware of how that sounds.” A small, rueful smile. “I kept thinking if I sent it I’d have to know the answer. And I was afraid the answer was that I’d imagined the whole thing.”
The fire. The snow outside. The low murmur of the lodge around us.
I thought about every month of careful emails. Every professional, door-closing exchange. Both of us writing things we never sent, both of us convinced the other one had moved on cleanly.
It would have been almost funny, if it hadn’t cost us three years.
“You didn’t imagine it,” I said.
His breath shifted. Just slightly. “No?”
“No.” I held his gaze. “I was in love with you by the second day. Probably before. I just didn’t know what to do with it.”
He reached across the space between us and took my hand. Slowly. Deliberately. The way you do something you’ve been thinking about for a long time.
“I’m not pretending anything right now,” he said quietly. “I want to be clear about that.”
“I know,” I said. “Neither am I.”
We stayed by the fire until the light outside went gold and then grey, the snow falling steadily beyond the glass, the rest of the lodge going about its evening around us. We talked — really talked, the way we hadn’t let ourselves in three years — about London, about the silence, about the weekend that had started as a favor and turned into something neither of us had known how to name.
At some point, without ceremony, he moved to sit beside me instead of across from me.
At some point, I stopped cataloguing everything I was feeling and just let myself feel it.
Later, when dinner was being called in the main hall and we finally stood to go in, he kept my hand in his. I looked down at our joined hands, then up at him, and something settled in me — quiet and certain and long overdue.
“For the record,” he said, low and warm near my ear, “this is the part where I’m asking. Not as a favor. Not as a cover story. Just — me, asking.”
I squeezed his hand.
“For the record,” I said, “the answer is yes.”
And we walked into dinner together, real this time, in every way that mattered.
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