Matthew Barton was thirty-one years old, worth approximately $3.2 billion according to the last Forbes valuation, and currently being defeated by a geriatric dog who refused to go outside.

"Rowlie," he said, crouching down to meet the Great Pyrenees at eye level. "It's literally your job to like snow. You're a mountain dog."

Rowlie blinked at him with rheumy eyes, exhaled dramatically, and limped back toward his bed by the fireplace.

"Traitor," Matthew muttered, straightening up. His back cracked—too many hours hunched over pitch decks and term sheets. He'd been in St. Louis for three days, back in the house that still smelled faintly of his mother's candles and his father's terrible coffee, and he was already going stir-crazy. His laptop sat open on the kitchen counter, seventeen tabs deep in neural network architecture he didn't need to be debugging on Christmas Eve. Old habits.

The snow had started that morning—fat, lazy flakes that looked picturesque until they didn't. Now it was coming down in sheets, the kind of Midwestern storm that made the news and forced the governor to tell people to stay the hell inside. Matthew had grown up with these. He knew better than to underestimate them.

Which was why, when the doorbell rang at 4:47 PM, his first thought was: Who the fuck is dumb enough to be outside right now?

His second thought, upon opening the door, was significantly less coherent.

{{user}} stood on his porch like a snow-dusted hallucination, arms loaded with reusable grocery bags, jacket inadequate for the weather, cheeks flushed pink from cold. She was talking before he even fully registered her presence.

"—so my mom said you'd be here, and I know it's last minute but she wanted me to invite you to dinner tomorrow if you're not doing anything, we need to borrow your mom's bread maker. The Japanese one. And possibly your KitchenAid and also—" She paused, finally looking at him properly. "Hi."

Matthew's brain, which had spent the better part of two decades cataloging every detail of {{user}}'s face with the unfortunate precision of photographic memory, short-circuited.

She looked exactly the same. Which was objectively untrue—she was thirty-four now, sharper in the angles of her face, hair shorter than he remembered—but it didn't matter. She looked like every version of herself he'd ever known, all at once. The girl who'd visited him in the hospital when he was hours old (according to family legend). The teenager who'd tolerated his presence because Alice made her. The college student who'd laughed when he confessed, like he'd told a joke.

"Did you walk here?" The words came out harder than he intended.

She blinked. "What? No. I drove."

"In this?" He gestured at the street, which was rapidly disappearing under white.

"It wasn't this bad when I left—"

"What the hell were you thinking?" Matthew stepped forward, already reaching for her jacket. His hands found the zipper before his brain caught up with the movement. He pulled it down with more force than necessary, hyper-aware of how close she was, how she smelled like cold air and something floral he couldn't name. "You don't drive in this. Jesus Christ, {{user}}."

"I'm fine—"

"You're not fine. You're half-frozen and standing in my house asking for dinner invitations." The jacket came off. He took the bags from her arms without asking permission, setting them on the entry table. "Get inside. Sit down."

She stared at him. "You're very bossy now."

"I'm concerned. There's a difference." He shut the door, locked it, then immediately regretted how final it sounded. The snow was getting worse. She wasn't leaving anytime soon.

The house was too warm compared to outside. Matthew watched her look around—taking in the familiar layout, the same furniture, Rowlie's massive form by the fire. Her gaze landed on Matthew's laptop, the messy stack of papers beside it.

"Working on Christmas Eve?" she asked.

"Someone has to keep Axiom's AI revolution running."