Chapter 6 - The Open HorizonThe snow began to fall just as Lena crossed the county line into Vermont, a soft, heavy blanket of white that muffled the roar of the diesel engine and turned the rolling hills into a silent, unbroken sea of gray and silver.
She hadn't gone back to the Apex depot in Albany. She had dropped the company van at a regional drop point outside Bennington, handed the keys to a bewildered night supervisor with a signed resignation letter scribbled on the back of a delivery receipt, and walked away without looking back.
Now, she was standing at the edge of the overgrown gravel driveway leading up to her grandmother’s old farm—the place she hadn't seen in six years, the place she had thought was gone forever after the bank foreclosure following her father’s death.
Except the foreclosure sign was gone.
In its place stood a fresh cedar gate, painted a deep, classic barn red. The fence lines had been cleared of brush, and smoke curled lazily from the stone chimney of the old farmhouse against the darkening winter sky.
Lena killed the engine of her secondhand Ford pickup—paid for with a cashier's check drawn from a Manhattan bank that didn't bear any corporate logo she recognized—and stepped out into the crisp, sweet mountain air.
The snow crunched softly beneath her boots.
As she walked up the stone pathway toward the porch, the heavy oak front door swung open.
An old man with a familiar silver haircut and a heavy wool coat stepped out onto the porch, leaning slightly on an ebony cane. Behind him, resting its massive chin on the wooden floorboards, was a 140-pound Neapolitan Mastiff. Its blind, milky eyes turned toward the sound of her footsteps, and a low, rumbling huff of greeting vibrated up through the timber of the porch.
Viktor Vance didn't smile—not broadly, anyway—but the hard lines around his eyes softened as he watched her climb the steps.
"You took your time," Viktor said, his voice carrying easily over the falling snow. "The kitchen's warm. And I had a feeling you'd prefer the coffee up here to the stuff they served down in New York."
Lena stopped at the top of the porch steps. She looked past Viktor at the warm, glowing lights of the farmhouse kitchen behind him, then down at the mastiff, which gave its tail a slow, rhythmic thump against the wooden floorboards.
May you like
Two short beats. One long beat.
She reached out, letting her fingers brush against the thick, warm fur of Ajax’s neck as she walked past him into the house, leaving the cold wind and the gray asphalt far behind her, stepping at last into a world where the truth was finally home.
