“He’ll be okay,” Muncie said. “You know he’ll be okay.”

But Muncie couldn’t make a promise like that. Nobody could. I had seen Ezra on the edge of death, just as I’d seen Gramp, and my mother. Sometimes people let go. This time Ezra might let go.

Muncie steered me into the house. The stove had grown cold.

“I’m no good at building fires,” Muncie said, poking a stick around in the ashes.

I got the kindling burning while Muncie warmed coffee on the electric stove.

“Drink this,” she said, thrusting a cup laced with cream and maple syrup into my hands.

I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t sit still. It was as if something stalked me in that house. If I sat still it would catch me.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I said, leaving the coffee untouched.

“You want to come to my house?”

“No. Not there. Come with me.”

I led Muncie into the tractor shed.

My hand moved over the equipment, over the smooth bodies, the hard seats. The cold burned my skin.

There was the radiation detector, hanging from the wall. And up on a ledge made by the timbers, the watches with their luminous dials silently, unceasingly emitted their traces of radiation.

Muncie listened to me as the whole story poured out. She listened, saying nothing.

I led her across the pasture, retracing in the dark the steps Ezra and I had taken his first day out. Muncie and I slid and struggled across the snow. “The walking’s too hard for you,” I said, watching Muncie strain to keep up with me.

“Everything’s too hard,” Muncie said.

I stopped in the middle of the field.

“What if he dies?”

“He was dying anyway,” Muncie said. “A lot of them are going to die. The doctors said that months ago. Mrs. Haskins said it.”

“He was not dying!” I screamed.

“He was. We’re all dying, Nyle,” said Muncie. “Haven’t you figured that out yet? We all have to leave sometime.”

I stared at Muncie in the moonlight. How did she know?

I had always thought I was so much stronger than her, smarter than her, better than her.

“Let’s go back,” I said. “You’re shivering.”

I adjusted my pace to Muncie’s and we moved, slowly, two shadows under the night sky, shuffling across the treacherous ice.

Together we sat on the chopping block, shivering, waiting.

“Look, Nyle,” Muncie said. “It won’t do any good for us to get sick too. Why don’t you go in and lay down awhile? Your grandmother will wake you when she gets back.”

“What about you?”

“I can stay with you.”

“Your parents will worry.”

“They know where to find me.”

I felt the violence of Muncie’s shivers press against my side.