a stone driveway, leading to an enormous estate covered in cedar shingles and stone, surrounded by towering pines.
I raise my eyebrows at Aksel who evasively says, “It’s way too big.”
“Not exactly the Wuthering Heights I expected,” I murmur. “More like the Winter Palace.”
Aksel laughs.
We park beneath a portico on the side of the house, ascend a flight of stairs, and enter through a side door. We walk by a wood-paneled library, down a long hall with polished floors, and emerge in a magnificent room with high-beamed ceilings, a river rock fireplace, and windows along the far wall, facing sheer rock cliffs.
“You live here by yourself?”
“Technically, yeah, though my family visits often. Here, gear room is this way.”
After Aksel outfits me with a pair of snowshoes, we exit through the mudroom door, cross the meadow beyond the deck, and enter the woods. Above us, the sky is an inky blue. The moon peeks out from behind a barren oak tree, like a polished freshwater pearl.
A brisk twenty-minute hike later—snowshoeing in deep powder is not a “walk”—we reach a clearing. In the center of the clearing, from a rocky ravine fifteen meters high, a waterfall crashes into a small lake whose incandescent surface glistens in fractured moonlight.
Unclipping his snowshoes, Aksel points to a rocky plateau jutting out from the western shore. “In the summer, this is the best swimming hole. The lake is warmer because of the hot springs, and you can see all of Waterford from that rock.”
Sitting down near the lake’s edge, I unclip my snowshoes.
Above us the stars stretch out in a canopy of diamonds. A soft wind ripples the lake.
“You chose a pretty great place to move,” I say.
Aksel sits beside me, stretching out his long legs. “Waterford’s my favorite place in the world.”
“Hmmm, I’d choose Portillo in summer, Kitzbühel in winter.”
He flashes me an audacious smile. “You must be a good skier.”
“I haven’t skied for a long time.”
“Sophia.” Aksel chuckles softly, and when he says my name, heat shoots up my spine. “You’re sixteen, aren’t you? How long can it be?”
“Two seasons,” I answer.
“A lifetime,” he says, which is ironic because it is true. A lifetime has passed since then.
I wring my fingers. Not now. Please don’t happen now.
“Last time I skied,” I blurt out, “we were in Gstaad. I begged my dad to race. He won so I demanded a rematch, but as I was persuading him, he got a call to return to Pakistan—”
Aksel’s hand twitches. Momentarily, I stop talking, but he says nothing, so I continue.
“I was devastated to leave early, so driving through Geneva, we parked near the Rhône Bridge to play my favorite game: I would lead us to our favorite place using landmark navigation. My father would follow behind, never interfering, until eventually I reached Patisserie Claudette. My mother would be waiting there with the car, and we’d all eat pains au chocolat …” I trail off.
Among the barren tree branches, wind whistles softly. Aksel watches me quietly.
“You didn’t want to return to Pakistan?” he asks.
“It wasn’t that,” I smile. “I loved Karachi. The intense atmosphere—the volatile politics, the walled complexes—it all intrigued me. I loved my friends. I loved the seamstress who embroidered me my own shalwar kameezes … But I was sad to return to Pakistan because it meant my father would disappear often. He was always busy on assignments …”
Silence lingers in the air between us.
Intuition warns me to be cautious, hesitant, especially after earlier tonight.
However, the fear has receded.
A more dominant part of me craves how my heart races in Aksel’s presence. Perhaps if I stop thinking so much about being afraid, I won’t be. I can live a normal life without assuming everyone around me is a threat.
“You don’t like talking too much about your past, do you?” Aksel asks cautiously. We are dancing around an issue neither of us wants to confront.
I gather a chunk of snow from the ground and squeeze it in my mitten.
“I was seven when I recognized it the first time. We’d been living in Tehran almost a year when I arrived home one afternoon to find our house packed: the rugs, the art, gone. We left that night in a troop transport. After that, I never knew when it would happen, but I always knew it would. I could try to have a normal life, and yet I could still wake up and have to board a train to Turkmenistan or a plane to Yemen.” I drop the snow from