Triadic Tales - Fifteen Minutes Before a Roaring Fire - Short Story (Part Two)

Triadic Tales - Fifteen Minutes Before a Roaring Fire - Short Story (Part Two) PART ONE
The afternoon rolled on toward evening and the coming event - dinner with her - lent an air of palpable excitement to things. Except for Adam. He had long ago determined that celebrity in itself was a fragile basis for excitation. He reserved such moments of enthusiasm for other things, many of which do not need to be named. In any case, as the cocktail hour drew nigh, Adam donned a spacious Greek natural wool sweater over his standard issue shirt and walked toward the entrance hall where everything in the rambling Vineyard home converged. 
Morton and Wife Two were standing in the hall with their eyes on the door. It was just a door actually. The house seemed to have neither a front nor a back door. It did not take a minute for headlights to pierce the gathering dark. 
She preceded the short, elderly gentleman who was her consort. As Adam was the only stranger, Morton introduced him to her, naming him but not her. 
Her first statement, after a polite handshake, was that it was terribly cold. It was. Especially for August.
Immediately, Adam asked if she wanted his sweater. Actually it wasn't his. It was Eva's. Eva gave it to him. Though in truth nothing in the life of Eva and Adam was so fixed that ownership could be easily assigned. 
She smiled, moved toward Adam and spoke softly.
"No," she said, in reference his offer. "But why don't we walk in there and sit in front of the fire and talk?" She gestured to an adjacent room where a fire was indeed blazing away.  
"Sure," said Adam.
No sooner said than done.
Adam thought she was rather like girls he used to know in New York when he went to parties there. A floppy wool sweater like his would have no place in that realm of prim cashmere cardigans. She was wearing a bluish version of such a sweater.  I am referencing Adam's color-blindness. It might have been greenish. Or even gray.
Their talk settled on her work, which was publishing.  And Adam's stomping grounds at the time - the Berkshires, at the other end of Massachusetts. Just now Adam was sitting as far from there as he could get and remain in the state.
Adam thought to himself that she might well enjoy the sort of thing he was doing at this point - driving back and forth across the country on secondary roads, filling spiral notebooks with observations and otherwise negotiating the time  following his marital dissolution.  He wondered how easy it would be for her to move about.
The ease of the whole thing was what must have produced  later reaction among the Broadley children, who inundated Adam with questions like, "Do you know her?" and "What was that all about?" 

Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store 

Buffer