The Shuddering

to get our asses back to civilization.” The sound of a mug being pulled from an overhead cabinet. “But don’t count on it.” Coffee pouring into a cup. “We may be stuck here till spring.”
    “What?” April asked, alarmed.
    “He’s kidding,” Sawyer assured her.
    “Am I? Have you looked outside? Remember the winter break when we got stuck here for two weeks?”
    “I’ll try the Jeep,” Sawyer resolved. “Throw it into four-wheel drive, see what happens…”
    “You’re delusional.” Ryan laughed. “I bet there’s two feet out there. Even if you get to the bottom—”
    “I’ll try it,” Sawyer insisted.
    “We really have to get home,” April added, as if trying to fool them into believing that this attempt at a sudden departure had nothing to do with her, but with circumstances beyond her control.
    Jane peeked into the kitchen just in time to see Sawyer leave. April followed him a second later. Ryan was left standing in front of the sink. He caught sight of his sister out of the corner of his eye and shot her a look.
    “Did you hear them last night?” Jane asked quietly, making her approach.
    “I heard her ,” he said. “Fucking maniac. I knew it the second I set eyes on her.”
    “Knew what?”
    “That she’s as crazy as a bag of cats.”
    Jane bit her tongue, taking a sip of coffee.
    “I have my radar set to batshit. I can smell a psycho from a mile away.”
    “She didn’t seem that—” Jane snapped her mouth shut, cutting herself off midsentence. No. She wasn’t going to defend that chick, especially not to Ryan.
    “What?” he asked. “That bad? Don’t bullshit me. You saw it too. I know you did. If she thinks they’re going to make it out of here today, it’s proof of her insanity.”
    “I’ll make breakfast,” Jane told him, not wanting to talk about it anymore. If the conversation continued, it would only be a matter of time before she lost her cool and burst into tears. Abandoning her half-drained cup, she turned to the fridge. “Maybe you should go help him.”
    “Help him do what? Get stuck? Pretty sure he’s got that covered.” Ryan took a seat at the dining table.
    Standing in front of the open fridge, she closed her eyes, her heart flipping inside her chest.
    “The moment he told me she was coming, I just had this feeling,” he continued. “Like, ‘Well, that’s it, there go our plans, shot to hell before they ever had a chance.’”
    “Then you should have said something,” she said softly, pulling a carton of eggs from the refrigerator.
    “Like what?”
    “Like ‘Don’t bring her.’”
    “Right, because that would have gone over great.” He grumbled into his mug, shaking his disheveled head. “This trip was doomed from the start.”
    “Then why are we here?” Jane asked. Ryan blinked up at her, surprised by the insistence in her tone.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean that if you knew this was going to suck, why did you still want to go through with it? Why couldn’t we have done something else?”
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know, anything. He could have come out to Phoenix.”
    “Great idea,” he said under his breath.
    “We could have driven up to Denver.”
    “And you would have agreed to that?” he snapped, snorting at the idea of it. “I would have said, ‘Hey, Jane, let’s go visit Sawyer up in Denver,’ and you would have said, ‘Oh, great idea, let me pack my bags’? Bullshit, Jane. I’ve been trying to get us together for years and you’ve been evasive every time. Oh, no, you can’t, you have stuff to do for school. Oh, it’s bad timing. Oh this, oh that, oh dear sweet Jesus, not Sawyer Thomas.”
    She swallowed against the lump in her throat as her eyes burned.
    “The only reason you came up here was because it was our last chance,” Ryan said, the edge in his voice evening out, skirting around apologetic. “The only reason I was able to talk you into it was because of Zurich, and even then you hesitated. Even then you had to invite someone to come up here with you as a security blanket.”
    Sweeping a hand across her cheek, she cleared her throat, fighting like hell to keep her composure. “And you regret that I did, right?” she asked. “You regret finally meeting Lauren. I can tell by the way you can’t keep your eyes off her.”
    “I don’t regret meeting Lauren,” he confessed. “Lauren is fucking amazing.”
    Jane stared into the sink, her fingers gripping the edge of the