“You could have called him anything, Ezra. You could have called him sheep-dip and he’d have come.”

Ezra ran his hand over the thick fur. He buried his face in Shep’s side. “Good dog,” he said. “Good Shep.”

“Hey, I’m starving,” I said, looking at the circles under Ezra’s eyes and the way his hands shook.

Ezra nodded. “I’m hungry too.”

“First we have to put your brilliant dog in the front pasture. Come on, Shep. Come on, boy.”

After we’d closed the puppy inside the fence, I started up the hill toward home. Ezra put his hand out and stopped me.

“Wait,” he said. “Could we wait just a minute?”

He stood in the middle of the road. Within his sight for the first time, stone fences snaked the borders of old pastures, woods of birch and maple cast shadows across the snow. Distant mountains humped their rounded backs against the cold. Ezra sighed. “I used to hike to a place like this. With a couple friends of mine. I’ll never see that place again. I’ll never see my friends again.”

I turned to Ezra, touched the arm of Gramp’s coat sleeve, then lowered my hand. Ezra shivered beside me.

He wrapped his arms around himself and squinted into the cold sun. The wind whipped his brown curls around the edges of his hat. I couldn’t even see the scar with his hat and his hair like that. My breath caught, looking at him. What it did inside me to look at him.

“Everyone died that day,” Ezra said, quietly.

“No they didn’t,” I said. “You didn’t.”

“I did,” Ezra said.

“Then who drove the pickup truck this morning?”

“Remember,” he said. “I’m the phoenix, rising out of my own ashes.”

I nodded.

“I never saw someone die before,” Ezra said.

For a moment I saw the sheet over my mother’s face, I saw Gramp’s coffin lowered into the ground. I heard his tired bones knock against the plain pine box he’d built himself.

“I know how it feels to watch someone die,” I said.

But did I understand what Ezra was feeling?

“Why am I still here?” Ezra asked. “When hundreds of others are dead, why am I still here?”

“Ezra—”

“My father managed the plant. Did you know that? We owed everything we had to Cookshire. We had a great life, Nyle. Lots of money, lots of things.” Ezra’s laugh rasped with sarcasm. “Where are all those things now?”

I looked out over the hills. A hawk circled high overhead. Something in the woods was dying. The hawk bided its time, making large, easy circles, waiting.

“I hated my father’s job at the plant. We fought about it. My father said, ‘It’s a job, Ezra. How else am I supposed to support you and your mother?’ But it was more than a job to him. He believed in what he was doing. He believed he could control it. That he could control the people who controlled it. He really believed nothing would ever happen.”