THE SECRET GAME OF LOVE
Seeing if the world outside our walls can tolerate us, or if we burn it down.
The cabin, when it finally handed into view through a break in the pines, was everything the loft was not. Built of thick, weathered cedar logs with a pitched tin roof and a massive fieldstone chimney, it sat on a private clearing overlooking a glass-smooth alpine lake. There were no neighbors for miles, no cellular reception, and no deadbolted steel doors only a heavy wooden latch and a wide wraparound porch.
Daniel cut the engine. The sudden silence of the forest rushed in, broken only by the faint chirping of chickadees and the soft whistle of wind through the pine needles.