But was he really isolated?

Max’s cabin was a small A-frame that had been in his family for more than a century. To the west lay a lake. To the south and north, Max could walk for miles and see no other human. But to the east, a thin trail snaked through the pines connecting his cabin to the county blacktop that ran south to Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a town of about ten thousand souls. So long as he could simply drive into Grand Rapids to resupply, his exile seemed destined to fail.

That failure had been on his mind on his last trip into town when he ran into Lyle Voight. What had it been, a week? Ten days? Time was unreliable at the cabin: minutes lingered, days lasted for weeks, and months disappeared into a fog. But Lyle had helped him put his finger on the problem: Max had been cheating. He needed to live like a true hermit, with no electricity, no running water, no trips into town. Lyle’s remark had been offhand, but it touched a nerve.

Max had met Lyle five years earlier, when Lyle was sheriff of Itasca County and the first to respond to Max’s 911 call the night his brother Alexander passed away at the cabin, a night Max still tried not to think about. And while they weren’t close, Lyle, a quiet man in his sixties with thick hands and thin gray hair, remained the only person in Grand Rapids that Max recognized by face.

On that recent trip to town, Max had just exited the Super One Foods carrying two paper bags filled with soups, and canned vegetables, and meat, when he saw Lyle in the parking lot, sitting in the cab of his pickup truck, tapping a finger on the steering wheel to the faint sound of music. Max had never been one to talk to himself, at least not out loud, so since moving to the cabin he had rarely said more than a few words a week, usually only a mumbled thank-you in the checkout lane of the Super One—and as his beard and hair grew longer, folks seemed just fine with not talking to him. But because Lyle had parked right beside Max’s SUV, Max felt obliged to at least say hello.

Lyle wore a beat-up ball cap and a frayed blue-jean jacket instead of his sheriff’s uniform. When he saw Max, Lyle turned down his radio and leaned out the truck’s window. “Hey, Max.”

Max opened the back of his Jeep Cherokee and put his bags inside. “Working up the gumption to go in?” Max asked, trying to sound more lighthearted than he felt. The words were like gravel in his mouth.

“Waiting for my daughter and grandson. They’re grabbing candy for the trick-or-treaters. I swear, we’d save a ton if we just bought a bag for the kid and called it a day.”

Max cleared his throat before he spoke again. “Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?”