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His truck was there.
Cream-colored, frost on the windshield, parked with the nose toward the trees. Just seeing it made her chest tighten.
She pulled in behind it and turned off the engine and sat there in the ticking quiet with her hands on the wheel.
Then she got out.
The cold hit her like a wall. Stars overhead, hard and bright and more of them than she had ever seen. Snow squeaking under her boots. She walked to the edge of the trees and stopped.
There was no path.
There was just the dark, and the spruce, black and close, and snow up past her ankles, and somewhere beyond all of it, the lake. She could feel it more than see it, the way you feel a big open space in the dark.
She stood there a long time.
This is insane, she thought. You’re standing in the woods at six thirty in the morning looking for a man who nodded at you from a ladder. Go home. Go home and teach twenty-two children about color and let this be what it is.
She almost did.
Then something moved at the edge of the trees.
An orange cat stepped out of the spruce onto the snow, as calm as if it had been waiting for her, and sat down.
She knew that cat. It was the one she’d seen asleep on the counter at Thistle & Ink on her very first morning in Merrybrook. The one Claire had never quite admitted to owning.
It looked at her with the composure of an animal that has seen a great many people standing at the edge of things and found all of them a little slow.
“What are you doing all the way out here?” she whispered.
The cat blinked once.
Then it stood, turned, and walked into the trees with its tail straight up.
She followed it.
She didn’t decide to. Her feet just went. She ducked under low branches heavy with snow and wound between trunks where the snow was thinner, and the cat stayed a few feet ahead of her the whole way, a small orange shape in the dark, glancing back every so often as if to make sure she was keeping up. She lost track of time. Five minutes. Ten. The cold burned her cheeks.
Then she heard his voice.
Low. Quiet. Not words she could make out, just the sound of him, talking to someone. Talking to nobody. Talking to the lake.
Her heart hurt so badly she had to stop for a second.
Ahead of her the trees were thinning, and past them was the wide gray-blue of open sky over open water. She looked for the cat.
It was gone.
She looked down at the snow. Her own boot prints trailed back behind her into the dark, one after another, deep and clumsy.
Beside them, there was nothing. No paw prints. Not one.
She decided, very firmly, that she was going to think about that later. Much later. Possibly never.
She took another step, and a branch cracked under her boot.
His voice stopped.
She walked the last few steps to the edge of the trees.
