Three days.

That was what it took for Samuel and me to fall for Elle.

It sounds crazy as fuck thinking about it, but it’s true. How does one go about falling hard for a person in three days? It’s easier than I thought.

Be yourself.

Do what you love.

Spend all your time with them.

Make each other smile.

Have mind-blowing sex every chance you get and on every flat surface that’s available to you.

Share parts of yourself that you don’t usually reveal to people.

Be the person’s friend.

We did all of that, and before we knew it, bam. We’re in deep. Samuel feels the same way. I thought Elle did too, but then she did this. It’s something I don’t anticipate, and now I’m the reason she left.

What I say to Samuel is not a lie.

I caused this.

It really is all my fault.

And with confused eyes on me from his side of the truck, he waits for my answer. It’s stupid, but it’s the truth. I just can’t bring myself to admit it.

“For fuck’s sake, Bastian, tell me what you did!”

“It’s about her stuff,” I finally say, making a sharp turn at the end of our driveway to get onto the only road to her cabin. “A bracelet she was missing.”

“What about it?”

“She said something about it again last night.”

“Are you trying to tell me she went back to that disaster area to find a stupid bracelet?”

“It’s not stupid. It’s her dad’s and brother’s tags. She had it custom made into a bracelet after they died.”

He pauses for a second to let it sink in. I don’t know if she ever got around to sharing as much with Samuel as she did with me. “Okay, so it’s not stupid. Poor choice of words. But still, you think she went back there to look for it? And wait, what did you mean by she said something again? She mentioned it to you before?”

Fuck. If anything happens to Elle, it’ll be my fucking fault.

I explain my lapse in judgment to Samuel. His face goes from urgent curiosity to annoyance, and by the end, when I admit that the tags were in that duffle bag in the laundry room with all of her things, Samuel’s in full-on rage mode.

“You’d better fucking hope she’s okay. If she’s not, I’ll…just hope she’s safe.”

Shit. I deserve that.

I step on the gas and speed up, but not by much. There’s new ice on the road that formed overnight.

“You had the girl’s bracelet the entire time?”

“I was going to give it to her…once I had a chance to take care of the custom cleaning of her clothes. All that dust, soot, and mud wouldn’t come out. It didn’t feel right handing over a bag full of filthy stuff, and I thought it’d be better to give her everything at once.”

“Well, obviously you fucking thought wrong, because look at where we are now. You’re an idiot, you know?” he shouts. “I’m not saying your intentions weren’t good, but you should’ve gotten a fucking clue when she kept talking about missing the bracelet. You could’ve given her that one thing, and explain away the rest later one when you surprised her. Fuck.”

“Don’t go off the deep end,” I throw back in his direction. “I didn’t think she’d go this far to get it back. Not now. Not this soon. And get off your high horse. you didn’t see it coming either.”

“My high horse? I didn’t see it coming? Dude, of course I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t fucking know about the bracelet in the first place! You want to know why? The two of you were caught up in your own little love bubble. With your soft conversations that would stop cold the second I come around. How the hell would I know anything?”

“You know, you’re sounding a little jealous right about now,” I tell him.

He shakes his head as we approach the edge of her driveway. “Whatever, man. Let’s just drop the whole thing and focus on getting Elle home. Look, her truck’s in the driveway.”

My heart leaps at one moment, then sinks in the next.

Yes, her truck’s right there, but Elle isn’t. As we roll up the driveway and park beside her vehicle, she’s nowhere in sight. I hang onto the hope that maybe she’s in the backyard. I can’t imagine her going in this nightmare of a disaster area on her own.

The aftermath state of the cabin is worse than the night we saved her. It looks like a war zone. Parts of the roof lay in heaps on the ground, some covered in snow, others not. What it tells me is that some new sections of ceiling crashed to the ground as recently as this morning. If it had collapsed overnight, there’d be snow or ice formed on it already.

The place is a tragedy waiting to happen.

And our Elle’s in there.

If anything happens to her…

Samuel and I can’t move fast enough as we jump out of our seats and make our way over to the house, avoiding patches of ice everywhere. We part ways at the front of the house, each of us taking a side, and run around to the back. She’s not outside.

Knowing I caused her to make this effort and put herself in this much danger makes my throat go tight. Adrenaline kicks in. All I can see and hear is what’s directly in front of me. I have to find her. My breathing is shallow as we run into the house through the side door to the kitchen. Samuel darts toward the living room. I rush down the hallway to the bedroom, avoiding the hanging pieces of wood, fallen electric wires and other debris on the way there.

I breathe a little easier when I finally catch sight of her. Thank fuck she’s in one piece and not buried under mountains of roof debris.

She’s on her knees, her body shivering, her hands and forearms covered in snow and dust and mud as she shovels through the rummage with her bare hands.

“Elle!” I say urgently. “Are you okay? Why did you come here all alone? Why didn’t you tell us you were leaving?”

She doesn’t answer me. She just keeps picking up pieces of rubble and her broken belongings, and setting them aside once she confirms it’s not her bracelet. The stuff that’s not frozen solid to the ground, that is.

Even as I stand here waiting for an answer, the weight of the more recent ice and snow causes what’s left of the damaged roof and building to creak

But we need to get the hell out of here.

And I need to tell her I have what she’s looking for.

“Come with me, Elle,” I say in a more demanding tone. “We need to leave here.”

I don’t add that roof can buckle and bring down the whole place any minute now, even if it’s true. I don’t want to scare her.

“I can’t…I need to find it,” she says through whimpers that sound like she’s been crying for a while.

She’s shedding those tears because of me. I did that to her, my actions, because I was an idiot. What I said to Samuel wasn’t entirely accurate. Well it was, but I held back one thing.

I had no intention of handing over that duffle bag. Not for a while. Probably not until the month had passed. In my mind, that’d be enough time to convince her to stay and put down roots. It was a possessive, stupid, ridiculously foolish thing to do, and utterly driven by fear. I didn’t want to lose her almost as fast as we’d found her. But that was going to happen anyway. Once she finds out I was holding onto her stuff without her knowledge, she won’t forgive me. She’s bound to walk.

“It must be somewhere around here,” she says, pleading to the earth, the universe, God, to anyone who’d listen, to give it back to her.

Dropping to a squat beside her, I cover her hands with one of mine, tilt her chin to me with the other, and hope that after I say what I’m about to say, that she’ll know from the look in my eye that I had the very best of intentions.

“Listen to me, Elle,” I start. “We need to leave here. Right now. Look, I have it.”

She opens her mouth to say something, probably to ask how I can have her bracelet, but Samuel finds us and clears his throat from the door.

“It’s go-time.”

I hear the other message he’s relaying to me. The structural integrity of this cabin is nonexistent.

Releasing her chin, I stand up to my full height and stretch my hand out for her to take it. “Come, Elle.”

“You have it? What do you have?” she asks. “How do you even know what I’m looking for?”

“You told me about it.”

“Guys,” Samuel pleads from his spot. “It’s looking really bad over at the north wall of this place.”

“In a minute,” I tell him, motioning with my hand for him to leave. I just need a minute to get it all out.

“You’re searching for the bracelet. The one from your dad’s and brother’s military tags. I don’t have time to explain, but I have it. It’s back at the cabin. Just come with me, and I’ll give it to you.”

“You have it?” she asks in disbelief, confusion on her face. “How?”

“I found it that night back at your place… the night I came back for your car keys and work bag. I’m sorry I didn’t give it to you right away. There’s a whole bag of your things back at our cabin. I wanted to have them all cleaned and restored for you. I didn’t think—”

“You found my things? You had my bracelet, all this time?”

“I didn’t think you were in any rush to get it back, especially not this fast. But I was wrong, and I’m sorry for being the reason you had to come back here. It’s my fault. I should’ve listened to you and set you at ease since the first time you brought it up.”

“Guys, we have to go, right fucking now!” Samuel shouts to get our attention.

I look over at him and see his hand aiming up, and when I follow it to the direction it’s pointing, I know why he’s freaking out. A loose beam teeters from a few pieces of metal strapping directly above our heads. From the sound of the creaking, the last remaining supports strain to hold it in place and are starting to fail. It can drop down on us any second.

I don’t wait for Elle to give me permission to help her up. In a split second, I lean down to her and wrap my arm around her torso, dragging her up and into the crook of my arm. But time and this cabin’s design work against us. This beam extends through the width of the place right to what was our safe exit from the kitchen.

“Run!” Samuel roars and hauls ass ahead of us.

My feet move double time, half carrying Elle out with me as I hear the loud, long crrrrrrrrack, and rrrrrrrrrip of strapping as they break from their anchors. Wood from the beam splinters above us and fall around us. Samuel gets to the kitchen door and steps aside, giving Elle and me a sharp shove out the door. We hurtle through the doorway, getting as much distance between us, and my peripheral vision picks up the thick plume of dust exploding out directly behind us after the beam crashes down.

“Shit. That was close,” I tell Elle from our spot in the snow where we land.

“Yes.” She brushes her cheek, unknowingly rubbing in some of the thin layers of dust that settle on her face. “Thanks for helping me out of there.”

“We’re just glad we made it here in time, right Samuel?”

No one answers from behind me.

I twist my body and look around.

He’s not there.