Did he know that child? Had he seen those eyes before?

Max thought about Lyle’s grandson. Were those Pip’s eyes in the frozen lake? They had to be. Max hadn’t had contact with any other child in years. Had their brief interaction meant that much?

The cabin had grown cold overnight, the fire in the woodstove never enough to keep the cabin warm. He returned to the bedroom and slipped into a flannel shirt and jeans, wool socks for his feet, before descending to load fresh wood into the stove on top of the embers of the oak log, barely breathing among the ashes.

It wasn’t Pip, he decided, but there was something familiar about the child’s eyes. Or had he made them familiar? Something cold filled Max’s veins, spreading out from his heart. He walked back up to his bedroom, not quite able to shake a growing thought.

Back when he had sold his house to move here, he had made a single trip to the cities to sign the paperwork. He’d packed only a few items: clothing, his dad’s guns, family keepsakes. What didn’t fit into the back of his SUV remained for the new owners to deal with—those were the terms of the sale. It dropped the house’s value, but he didn’t care.

He kept the keepsakes in the bottom drawer of his dresser: pictures, wedding license, rings, Jenni’s funeral notice. Now, Max laid the box on the bed. He hadn’t opened it since he left Minneapolis. Tentatively, he flipped the lid and pulled out a stack of pictures of Jenni as a child. He culled through them to find one from when she was maybe four or five. He held the picture up and looked hard into her eyes. Here they were, the eyes from his dream—but it had not been Jenni’s face he had seen.

He returned to the box, moving aside a stack of letters Jenni had written to him in college. Beneath the letters lay a bracelet, a chain with seven flat charms, golden plates each about the size of a dime. Jenni’s great-grandmother had started the tradition of adding a new plate with each new baby born. And when Jenni’s grandmother inherited the bracelet she continued the tradition. By now, the charms held the names of Jenni’s grandmother and her two siblings, alongside Jenni’s mother and uncle, and of course, of Jenni herself.

Max rubbed his finger gently across the seventh plate—the one with no name on it.

He hadn’t known that Jenni was pregnant when she died. He’d learned about the child afterward—after the autopsy. The medical examiner was the one who told Max that he would have been a father. All those nights of talking and dreaming, planning a family, a future. There hadn’t been a Christmas when he hadn’t envisioned at least three stockings to be filled. There hadn’t been a Halloween when he didn’t envy the fathers ushering tiny goblins around the neighborhood. He hadn’t understood the true depth of all he’d lost until the medical examiner told him.