My friend rested a hand on the hilt of his knife. “Do you want me to go see them for you?”

“No!” I said, frightening off the siskin.

“So what did you want to discuss with me if not your neighbors?”

“I don’t know what to do about Christmas.”

“You’re having Christmas Eve supper at our house.”

“I mean the day itself. I’ve got two invitations. Usually I go up to Sixth Machias Lake and spend the evening with Charley and Ora. Their daughter Ann comes from Bath with her husband and kids. I think Charley likes having me there as a buffer against his son-in-law. The problem, this year, is Stacey will be there, too.”

“Oh.”

“Meanwhile Dani wants me to break from tradition and go to her mom’s house in Pennacook.”

“Oh.”

“Exactly.”

Stacey Stevens was Ora and Charley’s younger daughter. She was a wildlife biologist, a bush pilot, a wilderness EMT, and my old flame. We had lived together for three years—almost gotten engaged—before things fell apart. She had recently returned to Maine after self-imposed exile in Florida.

As for Danielle “Dani” Tate, I was no longer sure what to call her. She was a former game warden, now a state trooper, and six months earlier I would have referred to her as my girlfriend. And yet since the summer, we spoke less and less and saw each other rarely.

I should’ve realized that Billy was the wrong person to ask for relationship advice. He and Aimee had been sweethearts at Machias Memorial High School. As a couple, they were an advertisement for wedded bliss.

“You’re kind of running out of time to make a decision,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

He scratched his bearded chin. “Isn’t Pennacook where you’re going today?”

“Shadow’s vet, Dr. Holman, has her practice there.”

“Two hours is a long drive for a check-up.”

Elizabeth Holman had removed a crossbow bolt from the wolf’s side—acquired in his last hours as an escapee in the wild—and nursed him to health. He had suffered ligament damage from the arrow, however. The injury prevented him from running at full speed, which meant he would never chase down prey again, if I had considered re-releasing him into the Maine woods, which I hadn’t.

Now he lived behind my house in a compound roughly an acre and a half in size, with chain-link fences ten feet high, impossible to scale. The fence extended below ground into a concrete foundation so he couldn’t escape by digging his way out, either. I had made sure he had bushes and trees where he could hide and an exposed ledge where he could sun himself, but there was no denying the fact that his pen was still a jail yard.