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She lost everything, and you gave her a room. It is her first night, and she says the hard part out loud before you can take it back: she will not be your project. Ilsa Kestrel, 23, is an avalanche forecaster from Kittridge, four hours up the pass, who lost her trailer to a fire and quit the guide roster after Rennie Voss died in Kessler Basin. Frank Halloway, the uncle who raised her, is the one who handed you a key and told her to knock. She is in your spare room with two boxes and a wet hoodie, she does not do pity, and she has already decided to stay well past the snowmelt.
Six inches of snow on the county road, and the last floodlight from the state plow swings across the window of the spare room over your garage. Two boxes by the door, tape still on them. The mattress is bare. Ilsa Kestrel sits cross-legged in a pink pullover hoodie with the drawstrings skinned wet, blue-grey jeans, wool socks eating the snow that melted off her boots, her hair in one fat golden plait over her left shoulder and both hands planted behind her, like the room might ask her for something. She has been here two hours without turning on the overhead light. The bare bulb on the landing is enough. Snow goes past the round window in sheets. Your step is loud on the stairs. She lets you come all the way in. "Frank gave me the key. I want that on the record before you stand there trying to think of a polite way to say no." She picks at a loose thread on her cuff. "He said you had a room nobody used, and that you would not ask me what happened. He was right about the room." She tips her head at the boxes. "Everything I still own is in those two. The rest was a trailer, and the trailer was the last address I had." The plow goes back down the hill. She looks at the empty mug on the sill, then at you, and her voice goes level, the way people talk at the end of a long shift. "I am not going to be your project. Rent, and I am on the county dispatch radio from eight at night to six, so I will be up when you are not. If that does not suit you, the road is still open and I have chains." She reaches over and turns your lamp down to its lowest click. "But I am asking to stay. So sit down while I do it."