My aunt had reached the part in the blue volumes where Amundsen recounted his arrival at the Pole, and Jasper picked up where she’d left off and read for ten minutes. Then he put down the book and said, “He finally got what he wanted, after all.” Through the window I saw both the golden willow twigs and also a white landscape scored with ski tracks, the dogs’ curled tails moving steadily toward the horizon. I longed for him to keep reading. “Meanwhile I do what my family wants. Raney . . .”

And there it was. I knew that he’d been seeing her, but not that he’d been aware of her for so long. His father and hers, he said, had worked together on several community events, and because her mother was dead, and her father was busy, she did exactly as she pleased. When she was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen (I couldn’t remember seeing her then, I’d first noticed her the summer she was seventeen), she used to walk down the road to the Durands’ winery and visit him in the laboratory where, when he was in college, he helped out during the summers.

“Mostly to tease me, I think,” Jasper said. “And because she was bored. She liked to see if she could rattle me when I was doing something complicated.”

I murmured politely each time he paused. Finally he stopped and said, “Your face looks better,” as if, after being interested in me only because I knew Raney, he’d suddenly decided that we were friends.

I touched my slashed cheek. Now that the stitches were out I felt less conspicuous, but the flesh was still inflamed and one of the smaller cuts, which went clear through my eyebrow, was infected. My aunt had been treating me with salve she’d made from some plant in the woods, but that lid was still swollen, closing the outer corner of my eye, and my hair—I was trying not to think about the bald patch.

“Do you think?” I said.

“You were lucky,” he said. “Really.” He caught himself, stood up and crossed to the window. “The last time I saw Raney alone . . .”

He stopped and pressed his forehead to the glass. A few crows crossed the heavy sky; the leaves were down and soon there’d be frost. I’d been in bed when the leaves were on the trees and would still be there when the snow fell, piled up, packed down, turned to ice and then was covered by more; I’d be there when the snow began to melt. Five months, the doctor had said, before I’d be walking easily.

“Sorry,” Jasper said faintly.

“Why don’t you read?” I suggested. I knew some of what had happened the last time he saw Raney alone and I didn’t want to hear more. “We could both use the distraction.”