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The sky was dark and the night was cold but the cabin was anything but. An electric fire flickered in the hearth, blowing warm air into the cosy living room. Tala lay sprawled across the sofa, the same position she had adopted for most of the past two days. She had slept well on Wednesday night, and she had powered through the final hundred pages of her book before she had got up on Thursday.
She had yet to leave the cabin, relishing in the beauty that she could see through the window without having to brace the cold. The snow was beginning to settle now, a fine dusting of white over the hard ground outside, and she loved to watch the flakes gently fall as she sat curled by the fake fire with a mug of coffee and her fourth book so far.
There were only eleven left, and another eight days. At the rate she had been reading so far, she would be done with them all before she headed back home. Both thoughts were mildly depressing: she was on a literary high, having devoured another chicklit and a festive novel before the mystery she was now close to finishing, and she was nowhere near ready to go back.
Christmas was only three days away. She tried not to dwell on that, which got a little easier with each book she started, her spirits only dipping when she came to the end of a novel and had to choose which one she would pick up next. Every single one was a new copy, a book she had never read before: a couple were recommendations from her brother; a few more were stories that had piqued her interest in the bookshop; the rest were novels that Maddie and Nick had read and loved.
The phone rang. She ignored it. With five pages left, she was as good as dead to the world when every word held her eyes captive to the page. Her heart was thudding, her reading glasses slipping to the end of her nose, and she held her breath as her face got closer to the words as she inhaled the final twist.
It left her pulse racing when she closed the book and dropped onto her back on the sofa, momentarily paralysed as she stared at the ceiling and ran through every word she had just read. No matter how fast she scanned the pages, she hardly missed a single word and she searched through every chapter in her mind for the hints and clues that she had missed. No matter how seasoned a reader she was, often guessing plot twists from the first hint, this one had eluded her.
Only when the phone rang again did she sit up, blood rushing to her head and her glasses dropping to the floor where they skittered under the sofa. With a grumble and a roll of her eyes, Tala lunged for her phone where it was charging on the coffee table, and she smiled when she answered Maddie's call.
"Hey, Maddie," she said, resuming her slovenly position with one hand behind her head.
"Hi Tala! How's it going?"
Tala rested her hand on the pristine book, which looked as though it had never been read, and she smiled. "Well, I just finished my fourth book and I haven't left the cabin since I got here. It's going pretty wonderfully."
