“I met Bill. He drove me up the mountain with your mom. They’re on their way to your street.”

I hung up the phone, shouting for everyone to come quick, Bill was on his way. In a minute we were in the rec room, pulling on our Irish Wellington boots underneath nightgowns and over pajamas, all five of us, Marie, Thomas, me, Ellen, and even Beatrice, who had probably just seen him a few days earlier. We galloped like lunatics down the drive, falling into the snow with no coats. Struggling up, we staggered forward, lifting our legs high. The snow was too heavy and deep to kick through, and it fell into the open top of my boots, freezing my bare feet. Several times I walked right out of them. We ran and fell, elated that we might finally catch sight of him.

“Shhh . . . ,” said Thomas.

We stopped. It was so quiet and still. Snowfall at night casts its own strange spell, and the streetlights glittered across the white drifts and the whole world, as I knew it, was erased by this beauty. When I looked up toward the lights, I could see the thick flakes still falling.

“I heard a door slam,” he whispered.

And then we heard the rumble of the truck starting up at the top of the street and watched as a streak of red taillights disappeared in the haze of snowfall. A dark figure was trudging down the road toward us—my mother. We turned to get back inside the house before her. We had missed him. We had missed the best chance we ever had.

I was staying at Sage’s house a week or two after she met Bill. I quizzed her endlessly about the truck, about him, details she noticed in the truck, anything in the back of the truck, tools, machines, and was it a Pennsylvania license plate. She’d listened while I complained about my mother and Bill and the secrecy. When we were falling asleep, she said something else.

“Libby, maybe Bill makes your mom happy.”

It sucked the air out of me. I was stunned that she would say something so treacherous.

“How can you say that? How can going around behind everyone’s backs be anything good?”

A while before, Marie had told me to stop going on about Mom and Bill, that I was turning into a weird Hamlet. “I don’t even know what that is,” I told her, and she said Hamlet obsesses about his mother’s affair with his uncle and thinks about them together. “That’s sick, Marie,” I said. But I did worry about why they met at truck stops and diners. I worried that Marie was right: Bill was probably married, or else they would just go to his house or apartment and we’d have met him by now.