Gina supposed it was an emergency for her, too. She was going to visit her mother while Chase had his deposition, to try to explain. She hadn’t slept since she told her mother she was pregnant, and the long nights were worse than the sick mornings, the dark patches flowering like bruises under her eyes. Her mother had said, “So you’re going to be a whore like the rest of us.” Her mother wasn’t well, she knew that, but still she had sat up that night and thought about those women, her mother and grandmother, her lonely aunts, their absent men. Going to college and teaching school had seemed to put her in a separate category from them. No one was marrying when she met Chase—marrying mattered only to her mother, and life with him was good. No reason to change it, no need to.

Now it was ten years later, and the most militant of her college friends had tied various kinds of knots in courtrooms and churches and meadows. A wrongful-termination case in Missoula had brought on two bad years, when Chase was gone all the time, staying nights in a motel instead of driving home. Gina wasn’t sure they had made it out of those years intact. She had seen the baby as a happy accident after Chase won his case, drunk on wine and praise, but Chase just saw it as an accident. And now there was Kathleen Sheehan on the phone.

The more immediate fear, as they drove up the winding road to the top of the pass, was that Chase would miss one of the invisible turns and they would go over the invisible edge and plummet to the valley below. The thick curtain of snow parted only a few feet in front of them, and Chase drove slowly, for him, into that curtain, following the disappearing tracks around each curve. The insides of the windows iced, and when she scraped the glass her own frozen breath showered her.

“This is crazy,” Gina said.

“I could drive this road blind,” Chase said.

There was still no visibility at the top of the pass, only the feeling of going down instead of up. Down was worse; the snow on the road had started to freeze into ice, and their wheels slid until the studded snow tires caught and held, slid and caught again. When the police roadblock stopped them in Garrison Junction in the valley below, Gina’s hand was cramped from gripping the door handle, and they hadn’t spoken for miles.

“How’d you get through?” the highway patrolman asked when Chase rolled down his frosted window. “That’s emergency vehicles only.”

“This is an emergency,” Chase said. It was less convincing when he said it to the cop.