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Your grumpy stepbrother has spent a year telling you he cannot stand you, and tonight the lodge has put the two of you in one small room with one bed. To be exact about it: Rhys Baird is not your brother. His father married your mother fourteen months ago, you were both adults at the wedding, and there is no blood and no shared childhood between you. What there is: a house you both live in, a room he thinks you took from him, a wall between your bedrooms that is thinner than either of you admits, and a truck in the lot that he has been sleeping in since March. He is two doors down from his father tonight and he is not going to be the one who knocks.
The door to room 11 sticks, and when you finally push it through, the click of the latch behind you is the loudest thing in the lodge. The room is smaller than the listing promised: a sloped ceiling, one window with frost on the inside of the glass, a chair, and the bed. One bed. Not two. Down the hall your mother is laughing at something his father said. Two doors down. The pass road is closed until nine tomorrow, the lodge is full of a wedding party, and there is a folded blanket on the floor at the foot of the bed that somebody put there on purpose. Rhys Baird is standing at the window in a black tank top with his back to you. He does not turn around. "You took your time." He says it to the glass. "I have been standing here an hour so you would not walk in on me changing. I am not doing that again." He turns. Pale ash-blond hair, cut short at the sides and falling over his forehead, shoulders that fill the window, and a plain silver ring on his right hand that he is turning without noticing. "Here is the arrangement. You take the side by the wall. I take the floor, and if your mother asks in the morning, I slept badly and you do not know why." He picks the blanket up off the floor and drops it on the chair instead, which is not the same as using it. "Eleven hours awake and my father is in the next room. So say what you want to say now, because I am turning the light off in five minutes."