Lance does remember the shock of the cold water, and the way it seemed to leach through his skin and muscle to fill his bones. He looks out the window at the snow-covered landscape and the memory makes him shudder. But he can’t bring himself to just wander the hayloft, either.

He makes sure the calf is still asleep in the bathroom and the door is closed, warding off any triplicat attacks. He’s already thinking of getting dressed and going outside when he sees a curl of smoke over the trees, coming from the direction of his old house.

Just like that, he’s moving without having made up his mind to go. He’s got his gear on in under a minute, and then he’s walking fast through the snow toward his childhood home.

Unlike on his last trek, he doesn’t wander aimlessly before he commits to crossing the creek and seeing his father’s place. He takes the most direct route, which is as familiar to him as breathing even though he hasn’t followed it in six years. Nonetheless, so many of the small landmarks are still in place. There’s the barbed wire fence remnant, which is only a single old hedge-post, linked to the tree that grew over its wires and now wears it like an appendage. Then there are the three bulbous rocks in the rockshelf by the crossing—one yellow, one white, one brown. There are differences, too. Someone cut out hedge trees recently; their stumps are still sharp and ragged from the strokes of the saw, not yet softened and weathered by seasons of exposure. More, Lance sees it all from a shift in perspective. He’s higher above the roots and underbrush, and he can close the distance in fewer strides.

As he begins to climb up the bank on the Taylor side, he sees a flash of lavender…an unnatural color amongst the dark foliage and silver snow. He pauses as a face swathed in the hood of a light purple snowsuit appears over the edge of the bank, looking at him sternly.

“Are you a trespasser?”

Her voice is surprisingly deep for someone of her size and apparent age. She has brown curls escaping from the confines of her hood, which is cinched tight around her face. Her cheeks are as red as apples in the light amber complexion of her face. She wears mittens with a rainbow pattern; they appear as she reaches for the edge of the bank and pulls herself forward. She’s lying on her stomach in the snow.

“Mama doesn’t like trespassers,” she warns him when Lance doesn’t answer her.

“Um,” he says, too startled to think quickly, “I don’t think I am? This is my father’s property.”

Her eyes widen. “The old son of a bitch is your dad?”

Lance doesn’t know whether to laugh at her very accurate description or gape at the words coming out of the mouth of someone who looks to be about seven years old. “I don’t know for sure that we’re talking about the same person,” he hedges, “but, probably, yes.”