But Max wasn’t a hermit—not yet. The solution seemed both obvious and elegant.

First thing the next morning, Max drove to town and had his electricity shut off. When he arrived back at the cabin, he went to work preparing for his deprivation. He buried two coolers in the crawl space beneath the cabin to store what vegetables he had already and those he intended to grow. He dug a hole outside where he would lay his refrigerator to hold frozen meat once winter came. He fixed the old hand pump in the front yard so he could have water. His main source of food would be the fish, so he rowed out every morning and cast a line until he caught enough for the day. By the sixth day, he had grown sick of eating fish.

Max’s father had left him two guns when he died, a twenty-two-caliber rifle and a twenty-gauge shotgun; they were among the few possessions Max had brought to the cabin. He hadn’t used either since he’d hunted with his father as a teenager, back before his father’s drinking had affixed him to the cushions of the living room furniture. Max had never actually shot anything on those outings, but he had watched his father. He believed he remembered enough of how to skin a rabbit or field dress a pheasant to make a go of it now.

On the seventh day of his hermitage, he decided to hunt down some red meat, choosing the twenty-two for that outing.

He stepped into the woods at daybreak, the air infused with the scent of wet tree bark, the world chilly and quiet beyond the crunch of pine needles under his boots. He walked south across land he had played on as a child, taking a path he and Jenni had walked the first time he’d brought her to the cabin. Some of the trees had already dropped their leaves for the fall, but most hadn’t. The brilliant yellow of the poplars and aspens mixed with the rust of the oaks and the bright red of the sumac. The woods looked like a child’s finger painting.

He carried the rifle into the state forest, no hunting license, the gun still registered to his father, and he considered the laws he was about to break. There was a time when rules meant everything to him. But Max was no longer that man—that much he knew. Who he had become remained lost in a fog.

After about an hour, Max leaned against a fallen tree, his gun at his side. He tried to remember what his father had taught him about hunting: Be patient, stay quiet, keep a keen eye out for movement. Max scanned the trees and was about to start walking again when he saw the rabbit, thirty yards out, moving carefully beneath the branches of a small pine.

Max raised the rifle butt to his shoulder and pressed his cheek to the stock, eyeing down the barrel to line up the front and rear sights. The rifle felt foreign in his hands after so many years carrying a pistol, and when he squeezed the trigger, the gun fired with a muffled pop.