She sat at the table and cried a little. For a short time she cried because she had to and then because she thought she should and when she knew that she stopped and dried her face on one of the towels and stood and found a box of cigarettes and lighted one, intending to smoke it and calm herself before walking up to the road, to let her eyes dry and lose whatever swelling might be there but as soon as she had the first smoke in her lungs she couldn’t stand to be in the house any longer so she lifted the valise and walked out into the afternoon up the track and smoked as she went and when she came to the highway she walked west toward Bethlehem, waiting for a ride.

Jamie stopped at the hotel to speak with his nightshift bartenders and the hotel manager and went on to Littleton where he took a room at the Thayer, paying for a week and ignoring the aslant eyes of the desk clerk, a man he knew from somewhere but could not say how. Things would proceed fine without him, the time short or long. Offhand he could name a dozen men eager or willing to try to take his place. So he’d gone as far as he thought wise. He sat in his rented room in an armchair throughout the remainder of the afternoon and watched the slow northern evening come over the town and then dark and still he sat. He had no appetite for food or drink. He sat smoking.

For the five years since the night they fled Barre he’d always one way or another been able to place her, to locate her, in his mind if not some actual structure. He’d always been able to imagine her. And now he could not do that. She was gone. Anything he thought was a warped thing, an approximation: she and Sloane in bed at the Maplewood; eating dinner there; already on a train south in the dining car; in a Pullman; in his motorcar, something better than the Ford with maybe even a driver while Joey and Sloane sat in the deep cushion of the rear compartment eating something out of a wicker basket and drinking champagne. He could see all this. He could not help but see it. And all of it, however close, he knew was wrong. He sat smoking. Like the man-jack felling trees who gauges and understands everything about the tree and then finds himself pinned beneath the fallen trunk, his legs crushed and dead already but holding the rest of him down into the snow to die slow. He did not understand how he had come here. It was all clear—this had led to this—but it made no sense.