“Isabelle!” Wilson turns around at the sound of Ruth’s voice. The beam of a flashlight scans the driveway just around the house, and though he can’t see her, he knows that Ruth is behind the light. “Isabelle!” The light bounces as Ruth makes her way through the snow. She is headed across the sweep of the lawn toward the river. “Isabelle!”

It had been Wilson’s impulse, too, to call his daughter’s name when he first came out to find her, though he knew better, and Ruth knows better, too. He’d thought Isabelle would be easy to find; he’d thought he could just follow her footprints, but the snow around the house is too tracked out for footprints to be distinguishable.

“Isabelle!” The beam from Ruth’s flashlight pauses and sweeps the area around the river; Wilson has already been that way and knows that no prints lead out onto the ice. Ruth turns and heads toward where Wilson stands just outside the sugarhouse, where they used to bring sap to be boiled down and filtered into syrup. They’d always had their own syrup when Wilson was growing up, and every time he’s taken Isabelle to visit his mother, for whatever reason she takes endless interest in the sugarhouse. He thought maybe she might be in there, but the sugarhouse behind him is empty except for the rusted boiling vat and, in the corner, old filtering wool that mice have made a nest of.

Ruth’s flashlight shines for a second directly into Wilson’s eyes, and he expects it to return to him again as Ruth realizes what she has seen, but it continues to bounce along, veering away from the sugarhouse and more in the direction of the toolshed. It is easy to be invisible out here. Wilson has been holding his own flashlight by his side; now he raises it and shines it at Ruth. Her beam halts and then jerks in Wilson’s direction. He puts his flashlight down again and squints into the light.

“Wilson?” Ruth calls. The light begins to bounce toward him. He shields his eyes in the glare. “I didn’t see you there,” she says.

“I know,” he says. He turns his flashlight off.

“You haven’t found her.”

Wilson shakes his head, though the comment requires no response.

“Fuck,” she says. “I’m worried, Wilson.”

The worry in her voice surprises Wilson, because he isn’t worried.

“It’s cold out here,” Ruth says.

“I know.”

“It’s been an hour.”

“I know.”

“And no trace of her? Nothing?”

Wilson shakes his head.

“Do you think we should call the police?”

“The police?”

“Yes!”

He pictures a handful of police stalking the property with flashlights, the beams passing over Isabelle as easily as Ruth’s had passed over Wilson. “What would we tell the police, Ruth?”