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“You’ve had quite the legal education lately,” Dix said.

“Yes.” Miranda thought briefly of the legal education her brother was supposed to have had. She sighed. “This place has had enough lawsuits for several lifetimes.”

They were quiet together for a few minutes. Then Dix rolled his shoulders back and crossed his arms. He cleared his throat and rubbed his forehead. Miranda glanced at him. He was not a man given to unnecessary movement.

“I thought the Lewis place wasn’t available for a bit,” he finally said. “All rented out with summer people who were keeping it through the holidays.”

Miranda sighed. Was there anything of import to her life that this man did not know?

“That’s true. I’m going to stay at a little hotel near Mum until it’s ready. I’ll be able to check in on her. Look for a job. Probably need to take some classes. Not much in the way of employment for someone with my skill set, such as it is.” She shook her head. “Weeding and harvesting vegetables is not much to start a career with. Neither, apparently, is a liberal arts degree.”

Dix repeated his forehead rubbing.

“I . . .”

Miranda had never heard him hesitate, stammer like that. He seemed to be someone who did not speak unless he knew what was going to come out of his mouth. She looked up at him. He was a full head and shoulder taller than she. He stared resolutely ahead and she stared at the stubble, a cut cornfield, on the hard line of his jaw.

“I have a guest cabin,” he finally said, his voice so quiet she had to lean toward him to hear.

She waited for more. She had no idea why he was telling her this. He was not someone who spoke about himself or his own life very much. At all, really. He didn’t continue.

“Yes?” Miranda finally said. “A guest cabin?”

“It’s a small outbuilding,” he repeated, starting over, trying again. “At my house. Off in a corner of the property. Private. Tucked beneath some big pines.”

Miranda felt her pulse tick up with hope. She was ready to be rescued. She imagined a cabin from a child’s picture book with lightly frayed, white-lace curtains and a musty handmade quilt on a big bed built from logs. A rocker made from birch twigs on the porch and an old traveling chest that had been turned into a coffee table in the center of the room. But she pushed the image away and tamped her hopes down. A cabin like that, where she could find refuge under Dix’s watchful eye? It was too good to be true, too much to wish for.

“It’s not been used in years,” he continued. “Not since my mother died and some of her people came up to pay respects.”

Her people. Miranda had never heard relatives referred to in that way. She’d also never heard Dix refer to his family at all. She wasn’t even clear where he lived. She’d asked him once. He’d responded with a single word: “North.” Then, when she had looked at him quizzically, had elaborated. “North of here.” Then, had nodded to indicate direction. As if this narrowed down the possible location of his home in any meaningful way. His voice moved on now, slowly, carefully, like someone crossing a river by stepping from stone to slippery stone.

“She used to invite people up from time to time. My mother, that is. She was from Virginia. My dad was from here. She had it fixed up real nice. No kitchen. But you—her people, friends, I mean, visitors—they used the main house for that.”

Miranda clung to the word
you
. She felt the soft warmth of his kindness spread through her insides, push gently into the coldness that had settled there. She was afraid to speak, almost to breathe, in fear of breaking the fragile thing hope had become to her.

“I don’t cook much,” he said, sidling slightly off topic.

Miranda thought of the sandwiches he ate, which were made on big slabs of bread she knew he had kneaded and baked himself. The stews and soups that filled his thermos she knew were made from vegetables he grew, venison he hunted. She couldn’t recall where she got this information from, but she knew it was true.

“It’s empty,” he said. “The cabin. Might as well put it to use.”

Miranda stood, desire and fear competing for her attention. She took a breath.

“Dix, are you offering me . . . like, is this, would you be open to renting . . . ?” Miranda murmured, allowing herself to be enchanted with the image of a mossy cabin in the woods, a place for gnomes and fairies—or orphaned children.

“Oh, you don’t need to pay me,” Dix interjected, his voice suddenly in a hurry. “I wouldn’t take any money for it. You could use it, just, you know, for as long as you need it. So you don’t have to stay in a hotel. ’Course, you’d have to come see it. See if you’d be comfortable there. No TV. Sketchy cell service.”

Miranda sighed. She nestled into her own fantasy of the place. “It sounds wonderful,” she said. “I’d love to come see it.”

They settled into quiet, each chewing silently on the decision they’d somehow just made together, the barrier they’d just crossed. A barrier they’d been getting closer to these past few months. Even though Miranda had insisted on paying him for as many of his services as she could, there were so many things he did for her that were impossible to quantify. The counsel and advice. The long talks. The ride to Plattsburgh when her car broke down and the trip to Albany to collect her mother. He was not a hired hand any longer. He was a friend. The only one she had. This kindness, this generous offer, she would accept. This she would take for free. Because it was for herself. It was a gift that had nothing to do with her parents or the past or the relationship of employer and employee Dix had had with her father. This was something between them alone. Miranda touched Dix’s arm again. Let her hand rest there a moment this time.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice a released breath.

Dix dipped his head. And for just a moment, the edges of his mouth turned up.

Dix gave Miranda careful directions, but his place was still hard to find, and there were few signposts along the way. She had asked him what color his mailbox was, but he said he didn’t have one, as he picked up his mail at the post office. The first two turns were marked by street signs, but then she had to watch her odometer and count the tenths of a mile off one dirt road and then another, look for a falling-down barn and an abandoned farmhouse, try to find a bridge obscured by scrub growth, and then, if he hadn’t been standing there like he had been set down by aliens, she still would have missed his driveway.

“You startled me,” she said as she rolled down her car window.

“I thought I better come down and wave you in,” he said.

“Good thing. I almost missed it.”

He seemed nervous, something expressed only by an obliqueness in his gaze.

“Better let me in,” he said. “It’s a long driveway.”

He climbed into the passenger seat of her Subaru, where he looked like a grown man on a tricycle, all knees and elbows in the compact space. Miranda stared straight ahead. She wondered if this was a mistake. She wondered if he was wondering the same thing. A man didn’t live in a place this hard to find if he wasn’t someone who valued solitude. Or if he liked the company of other people. She wondered why she’d been invited in.

Did he like her or feel sorry for her? Was he lonely or generous?

She’d known him for years, yet she knew him not at all. He was a collection of adjectives—reliable, capable, trustworthy, hardworking, skilled, private—but these words did not add up to a full person. Not yet. She wondered if that would change. If the man behind the list of admirable qualities would emerge.

The driveway took a turn and suddenly the view opened up. She saw a small glade among tall pines. At the center was a single-story home that took her breath away with its simplicity and elegance. There was a central square to the building, with two wings set at forty-five-degree angles flowing away from it. Large overhanging eaves protected its face while the arching branches of some deciduous trees she’d never seen before caressed the corners. The overlapping shakes were a lightly weathered brown, like bark. Several low walls and walks made of muted grayish-blue stones gave dimension to the yard. Mosses and creeping plants cascaded and merged together among the rocks. The home had the appearance of something that had sprouted up naturally. There were a few similarly subtle outbuildings scattered nearby, like leaves fallen from a tree. Everything was dusted with the first light snow of the season. Miranda turned off the car and sat, intimidated into silence by the serenity of the setting.

“It’s not at all what I expected,” she eventually whispered.

“No,” Dix said. “I imagine not. Bet you thought I’d live in an old trailer or something.”

Miranda flinched at the slight rebuke in his voice. Then conceded to herself that it was fair and due.

“Not that, exactly,” she replied. As she spoke, what she had pictured, without really knowing it, came to mind. “I guess I expected a little old farmhouse with a big barn and a couple of dogs on the porch, chickens scratching in the yard. Something that maybe your grandmother once owned.”

Dix sniffed his amusement. “My father designed this house. He was an architect,” he said, then waited a beat, as if he knew that information would be unexpected, would need time to sink in. “My mother was a landscape architect.”

Miranda’s mouth fell open in surprise and embarrassment. She realized suddenly that she had admired Dix but also made assumptions about him as a “local.” She had figured he had a poverty of experience and exposure, that his competencies had come more by hard-won experience than sought-after education. She had never considered him as a professional person because, in what she now realized was her own limited experience, serious careers were available in cities and in offices, not in the out-of-doors. Then she realized that almost everyone mistook him. Maybe that was OK with him. Maybe it was more than OK. Perhaps it was a willful and welcome protective mechanism.

She turned to say something to him, to apologize for herself, but he was already unfolding his body from the seat and the moment was lost. He stood in the drive and waved her out of the car. She got out and took a few steps in the direction of the main house, drawn there, intent on seeing how its sophistication played out on the inside, but Dix was heading in a different direction. She turned and followed him along a faint path that had yellowed the lawn to a far corner of the cleared part of the property. A giant beech tree shaded a small building. Spent nut casings—husks peeled back like miniature brown, bristled tulips—littered the mossy ground. She’d expected a cabin, something modeled after a traditional log lean-to. But this was a cottage. The style was Craftsman, not Adirondack. When they went inside, she found the bed was iron, not wood; the cover chenille, not quilted; the walls whitewashed bead board, not peeled logs; the curtains linen, not lace; the rocker on the little porch simple Shaker, not birch twig. It was a spare, unfussy hideaway. Miranda imagined that the woman who created it, Dix’s mother, had been someone full of art, ideas, good taste, and the confidence and skill that allowed her to express restraint. And also a woman who must have remembered and called upon the daydreams of the girl she once had been.

Miranda did not want to leave. There was so much comfort to be had here. She turned to Dix and smiled. He nodded. The deal had been struck, accepted, wordlessly. He left her alone in the cottage, closing the door quietly behind him. Miranda listened to his few footfalls on the porch. Then, they were lost in the grass beyond. A raven gurgled and was answered. Ducks quacked at each other as they flew somewhere overhead. She sat in an upholstered chair in the corner of the room and levered off her shoes. Silence settled. She closed her eyes. This was a place where she could heal. She felt that. And at the same moment, she was overwhelmed with the realization of just how much healing there was for her to do.

DARIUS AND SALLY

His given name was David, but he called himself Darius. It was not a nickname. It was a name he had chosen for himself. He liked that both his names shared the same first letter, but the new name had a not-easy-to-place exoticism to it that thrilled him. He’d always felt the name his parents had chosen for him was generic and bland. He’d known too many others with that name, and they were all boring, he’d decided. He’d been named after a grandfather he didn’t like much, someone who had started life in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, built a chain of hardware stores, and, while he made tons of money, stuck to frugal, simple ways.
Unsophisticated,
Darius thought.
Antiquated. Vaguely embarrassing.
His grandfather was someone who smelled of dust.

Darius’s father had taken the hardware-store money to Wall Street, where he grew it exponentially. In contrast, he created a lifestyle that expressed his wealth in the subtle ways that were visible to other wealthy people: the Harvard MBA; the blonde, sincere but insubstantial wife who served on cultural groups’ boards; the leather briefcases; the shoes and belts with discreetly placed logos that identified high-end brands; the monogrammed shirts; the summer house—not in the Hamptons, where one might have to mix with crass celebrities—but in an older-money enclave in Rhode Island.