The Shuddering

chemical dump,” Lauren brooded.
    “Drink it for three days and you won’t remember the difference. Same goes for quitting smoking.”
    “No shit?”
    “That’s what they say.”
    Lauren took a long drag. She gave him a wry grin, raising a shoulder in a shrug. “This is my last one,” she said. “I swear.”
    Ryan breathed a quiet laugh and looked away from her, surveying the endless wave of trees before them to keep himself from staring. He liked her. She was witty, charming, not afraid to crack a joke.
    The report of a gunshot echoed through the hills.
    “What the hell was that?” Lauren asked, startled.
    “Someone shooting their neighbor,” Ryan said. “Land dispute.”
    She gave him a look and he bit back a grin.
    “Probably just hunters,” he told her. “I think it’s turkey season or something.”
    Satisfied with his answer, Lauren sucked in a lungful of smoke. “So, we’re waiting for Sawyer?”
    “Sawyer and April.”
    Exhaling, she squinted at the burning tip of her cigarette, smoke and steam rising upward like a soul escaping a body. “You don’t think that’s going to be a little awkward?” she asked, plucking a bit of tobacco off the tip of her tongue, canting her head toward the kitchen. “Janey and him and some chick in the same house?”
    He drained his mug, coffee warming him from the inside out. “I asked her,” he said. “Like a million times.”
    “And she said she’s cool with it,” Lauren cut in, ashing her cigarette onto a patch of snow next to her feet. “But you know as well as I do that she’s lying.”
    “Yeah,” he said, looking Lauren over thoughtfully. “She is.”
    “But you still decided to roll with it.”
    “Last chance,” Ryan said. “It was either roll with it or never see this place again.”
    “Couldn’t come out here alone, just you and her?”
    “What is this,” he asked, “the Spanish Inquisition?”
    Lauren gave him an apologetic smile. “Sorry,” she murmured.
    Ryan frowned at the mountaintop in the distance, coiling his arms around himself for warmth as Lauren smoked next to him. “It wasn’t the original plan,” he offered after a long pause. “Sawyer bringing this girl.”
    Lauren quirked an eyebrow. “No?”
    Ryan shook his head. “I’ve never even met her.”
    “So, this was supposed to be some kind of, I don’t know, reunion or something?” Lauren pressed.
    “Is that stupid?”
    He watched Lauren’s face soften as he waited for her response. “Yes,” she said after a beat, “stupidly sentimental.”
    “I guess I just don’t want her to be alone, you know?” He shifted his weight from one boot to the other, his gaze fixed on the porch’s banister.
    Lauren leaned against the railing. “Ooh,” she said, a spark of realization crossing her face. “This is all because of Switzerland, isn’t it?”
    Ryan shrugged almost helplessly. It was an amazing opportunity, but leaving his sister behind wasn’t exactly easy.
    Sawyer had grown up with them. Sawyer and Jane had been together for more than three years in high school. It had been weird at first—his best friend dating his twin sister—but he’d learned to like it. Now, with Zurich in his not-so-distant future, it would make him feel better to know that his two closest friends were together again, taking care of each other. Without that assurance, Ryan would be stuck picturing Jane alone in her apartment grading badly colored drawings and fighting with her louse of a future ex-husband.
    “You know she’ll be fine,” Lauren told him. “Jane is always the brave one. Besides, what about me?”
    “What about you?”
    Lauren scoffed teasingly. “Well, am I good for nothing?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know you that well.”
    “Lucky for you, you have four uninterrupted days.”
    “I only need three,” he joked, and she blushed and turned away.
    A snap of branches pulled both Ryan and Lauren’s attention to the trees. Lauren opened her mouth to speak, her expression startled, when a family of deer stepped out of the trees and dashed across the steep driveway. She laughed as she pressed a hand to her chest, shaking her head at herself, only to jump at the scratching behind her a second later. Oona was standing behind the kitchen door, her nose smearing the glass as she waited to be let out.
    “Jumpy?” Ryan asked as he stepped away from the railing and cracked the door open to let the husky onto the porch. Oona bounded through the door,