“Get your head out your . . . out of the sand,” Nick had told her.
But she didn't see how the development impacted them. They had their piece of paradise. It was protected. She walked it nearly every day. This place was her legacy, the only legacy she was likely to leave. And developers couldn't touch that. They couldn't chop down one tree or carve up one hill on her ten acres unless she let them. She'd throw herself on a funeral pyre before allowing that to happen.
“I control what I can,” she said, “and don't think about what I can't.”
Anne looked around the front room, feeling its warmth. The place was heavy with the scent of apples and cinnamon and banked fire. She rubbed her jaw, the back of her neck, coaxing the tension out of her muscles. She'd nearly lost the cabin once, nine years ago, when her grandfather put the place up for sale. The only solution, the only possible course of action was that Anne should buy it.
“No,” Nick had said.
“But it's perfect,” she had argued. “He's practically giving it away.”
“Hell of a commute,” Nick said.
“Not that bad,” she said. “An hour tops.”
“You won't be driving that hill every day. I will.”
“Think about the quality of life.”
“I am,” he had told her.
Anne wandered into the bedroom and studied the tight, sterile covers on their bed. When was the last time they'd made love? It had been summer, certainly. July. More than three months ago. Everything was different now, the dogwood turned shrimp pink, the mistletoe greener on the shedding branches of maples, the lacy bracken fern withered by days grown cold and short.
Dust motes danced in beams of light falling through the slats of the vertical blinds. She heard the deep-throated drone of bulldozers in the distance and the sound of Nick walking away from the cabin, down the narrow, rutted path. Crunching pebbles. A crack of stone against the siding. The muted murmur of him calling to her, something about a hike.
Anne stepped out on the deck. In the distance, she heard a hammer banging against wood, a saw powering through lumber, and Nick skidding on the trail below the cabin. Leaning against the railing, she scanned the canopy of pine and oak, spotting two blue jays and a squirrel. She wished she had remembered to buy them peanut hearts. She heard Nick's voice, his crisp, irritated tone.
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