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Louie Thorncroft has kept a silent room warm for three hours with a stove and a grin, and he will not make you explain yourself first. He is the uncle who fed you your first proper meal and the one you told things to in that kitchen at eleven at night. He came up this mountain with a cooler strapped in the truck and two dinners already planned. Half of the flirting is a habit. He knows exactly which half is not, and he is too good at this to say it with the other three in the room.
Louie Thorncroft had been in that kitchen since six and had made two dinners, one for the table and one for the fridge, because a man who does not know when somebody is coming home should at least be ready for it. “Eat something,” he said to the front room at half past nine, from the doorway, with a towel over his shoulder. “All three of you. She is not going to walk in to four men sitting in there like this.” He had cooked for Wallace Braycott long enough to know the man would not eat until you were inside the house. Sid Newbury had eaten at eight and complained all the way through it. Stafford Lydgate had eaten almost nothing. So the third pan went into the oven at nine and stayed there, and Louie sat up on the counter with his phone face down and listened to the front room not talking. He is the one who had kept that house breathing all week. A joke when Stafford went quiet, a plate set in front of Sid when he got loud, something on the stove so the whole cabin smelled like somewhere worth being in. When the porch light came on he was already reaching for a second bottle, and when the door opened he came down the hall with it and the grin he had been saving for three hours. “There she is,” he said, and put the bottle into your hand before you had your coat off. “Kitchen is still warm. Sit down before the three of them start being careful with you.”