“Hello!” Ruth calls, but Thomas has turned around, a skinny bundled figure running through the snow. Ruth watches him as he goes, leaving a trail of footprints the same as the ones she’s been following.

The mall smells like wet wool and bad breath. It is stuffy and packed with Christmas shoppers; Isabelle allows her father to take her by the hand and lead her through the crowd. The faces of other shoppers seem to flash by Isabelle as they pass; she has time to look at each one for only a second, and it is interesting, Isabelle thinks, how when you just glance once at a stranger, the expression he or she is wearing in that moment is the expression you remember, as if with that glance you have taken a mental photograph. She looks down at her boots and watches the laces drag, trying to remember the faces she has glimpsed: a woman with her hand beneath her chin to catch the cookie crumbs falling from her mouth as she chews; a man with his nostrils flared and his mouth open as he takes a breath in for a sneeze; another man in the middle of a sip of hot coffee, his eyes watery behind the coffee’s steam. She wonders if somewhere in her mind are mental photographs of everyone she has passed this afternoon, and she wonders why it is that these three are the ones she remembers first. If she thought hard about it, she is sure she could summon the images of other faces—like the boy with the cut beneath his eye, and the woman in the wheelchair digging through her purse. Yes, all the faces are in there somewhere, Isabelle is sure. They must be.

She looks up from her boots and glances over at a rough-skinned man with a blue silk scarf tied around his head. His face reminds Isabelle of the smell of stale smoke, and though she means to look immediately away, to preserve this face as a still photograph rather than an animated memory, she lets her eyes linger for a moment on the man. His eyes are trained intently on something to his left, and his brow is creased; Isabelle follows his gaze. But she cannot make out what or whom among the many shoppers and the signs for Christmas sales and the holiday decorations he is looking at, and then suddenly she has walked right into her father, who has paused before the window of a store.