Chapter 8 - The Winter Garden
The snow came to Chicago on the first Tuesday of December, not as a gentle dusting, but as an eight-inch blanket of heavy, lake-effect white that choked the side streets and turned the limestone balustrades of the Moretti penthouse into miniature glaciers.
For the first time in three years, the terrace doors were unlocked.
Sarah stood in the doorway, wrapped in an oversized wool pea coat that Dante had worn when he was eighteen, watching the twins navigate the drifts.
They were unrecognizable from the two screaming animals who had occupied the ruin of the nursery six weeks earlier.
Mia wore a red knitted snowsuit with matching mittens, her dark curls tucked beneath a pom-pom hat, stomping through six inches of powder with deliberate, joyful fury. Bella was on her hands and knees by the low stone parapet, using an empty plastic yogurt cup to build three lopsided towers that she called her 'church for the birds.'
Behind them, Dante stood with a cup of black coffee in his hands, leaning his shoulder against the heavy bronze doorframe.
He was not looking at the city. He was looking at Sarah’s boots—a pair of heavy, sheepskin-lined leather boots he had ordered from an armorer in Montreal who typically made tactical footwear for alpine border patrols.
"Your brother called Arthur from Idaho this morning," Dante said.
Sarah turned her head, her breath pluming white in the crisp, twenty-degree air. "How is he?"
"He has gained twelve pounds," Dante said, his tone dry. "The clinic director says he spends four hours a day chopping pine logs for the wood-burning boilers. He asked if he could stay through the spring to work the horse paddocks."
A small, breathless laugh escaped Sarah’s lips—the first true, unburdened laugh Dante had ever heard from her.
It was a bright, clean sound that cut through the muffled roar of the city traffic below like a small silver bell.
"Toby hated the city," she murmured, turning back to watch Mia hurl a handful of dry powder into the wind. "Our father used to take him out to the sand dunes in Indiana once a year. When we came back to Division Street, he would sit on the fire escape and stare at the brick wall across the alley until my mother made him come inside for lard toast."
Dante took a slow sip of his coffee. The steam rose around his nose, smelling of dark chicory.
"He does not have to come back to Division Street," Dante said.
Sarah looked at him. "What does that mean?"
"The Moretti trust owns nine hundred acres of timberland along the Salmon River," Dante said, his gaze fixed on the distant gray line of the lake. "There is a house of squared cedar logs. There is a barn with six draft horses and two tractors that need someone who knows how to keep diesel engines from freezing in forty below zero."
He turned his head to look at her.
"A man who works that land does not owe money to bookmakers on Archer. And he does not have to watch his sister ride the Red Line at two in the morning to pay for his medicine."
Sarah’s throat tightened. The cold air burned her lungs, but her chest felt suddenly, miraculously light, as if an iron weight she had carried since her fourteenth year had dissolved into the winter morning.
"Why are you doing this, Dante?" she asked softly.
It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name without an edge of defiance or survival in her voice.
Dante did not answer immediately.
He set his coffee cup down on the stone ledge beside the door, stepped out into the six inches of snow in his thin leather shoes, and walked until he was standing two feet from her.
He reached out his bare hand, caught a stray curl of dark hair that the lake wind had pulled across her lips, and tucked it gently behind her ear. His fingers were cold from the snow, but his touch was so light, so hesitant, that she could feel the trembling restraint in his knuckles.
"Because three years ago," Dante said, his voice dropping into that dark, melodic register that sounded like an old song from the hills, "I thought God had closed the door to this house and thrown the key into the river."
May you like
He looked past her toward the two girls, who were now engaged in a fierce, laughing battle over a broken branch from an ornamental cedar tub.
"And then you walked through the door with cheap shoes and a tote bag," he murmured, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her temple, "and you showed me that the room wasn't empty. It was only dark."
