It had been two days since she’d called to say she was applying for yet another new job. Having been a state trooper for less than four years, she was already thinking of jumping ship. The Portland Police had a flashy new chief who had been recruited from Gary, Indiana. At his first press conference, he had announced his intention to restructure the department from top to bottom and increase the diversity of his force.

“He’s creating two new sergeant positions, one focused on domestic violence,” Dani had said excitedly. “There’s no way he’s not hiring a woman for that position.”

“I thought you were committed to the state police.”

“It’s the same boys’ club as the Warden Service. Jemison is promising to make real changes. And the job would be a stepping-stone to something even bigger.”

Dani had had a health scare six months earlier—she’d contracted encephalitis that was at first diagnosed as the often-fatal Powassan virus—and had come through with no lingering damage to her brain. But she had emerged from illness with a new ambition.

“I am not going to wait for the things I want to fall in my lap,” she’d said. “Life’s too short.”

“Not if you learn to live in the moment.”

Even now I remembered the silence with which she received this principle, so central to the way I lived my life.

Had she given up waiting for me, too?

I hadn’t thought of myself being in a hurry to settle down. But recently, a detective friend had announced that his new wife was pregnant, and I’d been surprised by the stab of envy I’d felt.

As far as I knew, however, Dani and I hadn’t officially broken up. In four days we were still scheduled to drive to her mother’s house in the same derelict mill town where I was taking Shadow. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt that she’d been too preoccupied with the possibility of a new job to confirm with me.

It would be the first time in six years that I missed celebrating Christmas with the Stevenses. But this year, Stacey would be there again.

In the town of Liberty I passed a farmhouse with an all-terrain vehicle in the dooryard and a life-sized dummy, sewn together from grain sacks and dressed like Santa, propped behind the handlebars. A nearby spruce had been decorated with strings of Budweiser cans. It must have required some truly heroic drinking to provide the raw materials. Instead of a star at the top, the merrymakers had secured a naked, spread-eagled Barbie doll.

Shadow broke wind inside his kennel forcing me to roll down the windows. The air that came whipping in felt like it had blown all the way from Siberia. My eyes began to water from the intense coldness. I rolled the windows up.