She puts the mug down and walks over to the window. She can feel outside’s cold even through the glass. Across the yard, Isabelle has added a second layer of snow bricks to her fort. Maggie is a black shape in the snow nearby, intent on rawhide, or a stick, Ruth can’t tell for sure.

Behind her, Wilson stares into the eggs. “We had been doing. We went out and cut a tree down. We were in good moods. But you’re right, too. You’re right. Our doing just clashed with yours.”

“Jesus. Wilson, what are we going to do? We cannot continue to live this way.” She turns around.

Wilson shakes his head. “No,” he says.

“So what do we do?”

Wilson sighs. He shakes his head again, all of a sudden filled with a terrible sense of hopelessness, which is the thing that he and Ruth now have in common.

She has just added the fifth layer of snow bricks to her fort when she is aware of someone else’s presence nearby. She is inside the fort, and she’s not sure what it is that makes her certain she is not alone; there are no sounds to suggest it, no shadows, and Maggie hasn’t looked up from her rawhide, her ears perked as they’d be if she sensed someone coming. For some reason, though, Isabelle suddenly senses she is not alone, and expecting that it is her father or mother come out to see if she wants breakfast or to give her a hand with the snow fort’s roof, she lies down where she is inside the fort instead of crawling out through the space she’s left as a door, knowing this will send the message that she wants to be left alone.

She studies the view from the snow where she lies: the crooked bricks loom in an oval around her, part of them blue in their own shadow, and part of them, on the other side of a sharp diagonal line between sun and shade, so bright they make the backs of her eyes ache when she looks at them directly. The snow bricks circle her five layers up, bright and shadowed, framing the sky, which seems a false shade of blue, almost three-dimensional, so that even lying on the ground, she feels as if she is in it. The tallest branches of the nearby trees tremble in a breeze she can’t feel on the ground, tottering in and out of sight. She can count two clouds, both of them directionless wisps, thin and high. A small plane buzzes overhead, a silver flash.