This time, it has been easier for Sam to stop drinking. What he needed all along was not the drink but the foggy sense of wellbeing that came with the drink. The escape from himself. But he doesn’t feel the urgent desire to escape from himself anymore. He isn’t a hero, just a newspaperman who is sometimes ambitious, often afraid, full of venial sins, and dodging mortal ones. Be better than what goes on around you. He promised her.

Sometimes at night, though, he dreams of escaping. He is underwater, his feet planted to his boot tops in thick river mud, holding his breath. The current is tugging him downriver, toward the ocean.

In the murky water, large, lumpish objects drift by. Some of them have faces—eyes wide open in astonishment, mouths agape. Their fingers are splayed, reaching, trying to grab the brown water and hold on. Trying to grab hold of Sam.

Always, he pushes them away, his lungs burning from lack of breath. Far overhead, something moves on the surface, casting its fat shadow all the way down to the bottom of the river. What is casting the shadow? It is never clear. Something big, looming out of the dark future. He cannot hold his breath any longer. His feet are stuck, as in cement. One of the floating corpses latches onto him. He gulps cold water that tastes of tea. He tries to cry out, but his voice is lost in water.

The black corpse has him and won’t let go. He feels his feet lifting free of the mud, his body caught in the current, flying to the sea.

Then he wakes to Gray Ellen, peacefully asleep beside him.

“Look at the lights,” Sam says now, stepping beside her and offering her a flute of champagne. Through the mist of blowing snow, the lights of the city glimmer yellow and blue and orange against the drifts in the street.

“Every light in the world is on tonight,” she says. She is not happy, but she is content. She feels safe, here on home ground. Sam covers the city desk for the Bulletin. She teaches at Friends School. There are no mobs in the street, except for the revelers.

“It will be a good year for us,” Sam says. “I can feel it.”

“You say that every year.”

He always expects too much, and then the disappointment overwhelms him. Better to expect nothing, to be grateful for small blessings. But she doesn’t really believe that—who can live without hopes? It is only the future, bright as a field of new snow, that makes it possible to survive the present.

Still, she doesn’t want to know what the new year will hold. She will trust herself to bear it.

Outside, the world seems frozen. It is two minutes till midnight.