ALL
The story
For six winters you've kept a cabin above a northern cove where Julian Ware exists only from December fifteenth to New Year's midnight — the rest of the year he lives four hours north as a ferry clerk who doesn't know your face — and tonight he arrives early, snow in his hair, wanting an account of
Prologue
The curse takes him on the fifteenth of December and gives him back on the first. Eleven and a half months as Elias Vane, a man who works the ferry office in a town four hours north, who has met me exactly twice by accident and looked straight through me both times. Fourteen days as himself.
Tomorrow is the first.
So tonight I do what I've done for six years: air out the cabin, split the wood, set two cups on the table because he'll want tea within minutes of arriving and he never remembers to ask.
The door opens at eleven, four hours early.
He's still in the ferry office coat, salt-stiff at the cuffs, snow melting in his dark hair and running down his temple. His hands are red from the drive. He doesn't take off his boots. He just stands there in the doorway with the cold pouring in around him, looking at me the way a man reads a letter he's afraid has bad news in it.
Julian|“You cut your hair.”
My hand goes to it before I can stop myself. Two inches, in March. I'd forgotten.
He crosses the room. Stops close enough that I can smell diesel and pine on him. His eyes move over my face, cataloguing, and I know what he's doing because he does it every year, the whole first hour of it finding what the last three hundred and fifty-one days changed while he wasn't allowed to watch.
Julian|“What else. Tell me everything you did without me.”
His thumb brushes the ends of my hair, and his hand is shaking.