Ruth stands at the door for some minutes watching her daughter watch the snow, wondering whether she should go to her, usher her back to bed. She wonders what Isabelle is thinking as she sits there, or whether she has let her mind go blank. Ruth would like to go outside and ask her. She would like to go outside and sit beside her daughter and say, Isabelle, tell me what you’re thinking, and she would like for Isabelle to answer, I am thinking about my drawings, or I am thinking about Africa, or I am thinking about the cold, which now, sitting there bare-legged in her nightgown and Wilson’s parka, she does not even seem to notice.

But if Ruth did that, if she put on her own boots and jacket and went outside to sit beside her daughter, none of that would happen. Instead, Isabelle would go back inside, or she would stand and walk out into the night, or, maybe worst of all, she would let Ruth sit beside her in what has come to seem a deafening silence. Ruth puts her hand against a pane of the window’s glass and holds it there above her daughter’s body. She sighs, and after a minute she takes her hand away and walks down the hallway to the laundry room, where she pulls one of Isabelle’s nightgowns from the dryer. The one her daughter is wearing now will be wet.

She pauses at the porch door before going back upstairs. The mark of her hand is still on the glass, traced in a blur of fog. Outside, Isabelle sits motionless, her chin still resting in her hands. Ruth turns and goes quietly upstairs. She walks to Isabelle’s room at the end of the hallway and spreads the dry nightgown on her bed before returning to her own room.

Wilson has rolled onto his back and is snoring loudly. She slides into bed beside him; he is warm. She slides closer against him, nudges his shoulder.

“Wil,” she says. “Wilson.”

His breath catches in his throat, and his eyes open.

“Roll over,” she says. “You’re snoring.”

“Sorry,” he says. He rolls onto his side, facing away from Ruth, and she presses her body against his, her arm wrapped around him. Her breath is warm on his neck and still smells like wine from dinner. He looks out the window beside the bed and watches the snow fall beneath the single streetlamp mounted to a telephone pole. He has always liked this streetlamp because, he figures, it is theirs to the extent that it is there only because their house is. In the city, the streetlamps are anonymous and everywhere; they don’t care for whom they shed their light.