Jessie had claimed the bedroom next to theirs, a small but bright little room with a pretty view of the woods and hilltops out the back. And their bedroom took her breath away. The very first night, David held her, soft and naked, one hand idly stroking the side of her breast while they watched the stars through the skylight. The rooms were still sparsely decorated, cluttered with the boxes and the organized mess of the move, but they felt comfortable and the newness of everything settled down upon her like mist from a fountain on a hot summer day. The drive up was already fading to an old memory, lost among the stuffing of twenty-eight years.

Now the sky was a brilliant blue, the rare depth of color peculiar to the heavens on a clear, cold winter’s day. The sun beamed down brightly, but without any warmth, a token gesture. The snow sparkled, so white it was hard to look at without squinting.

A few miles from their house, she came to a fork in the road and took the left turn, following the river. Occasionally, she passed what could be a driveway or logging road running off to her left into the woods, but there were never any tracks, and it was tough to tell with the deep snow.

She passed a trailer that spewed a long, lazy spiral of gray smoke from its chimney into the sky. After that was a farmhouse, then two more. She guessed she had hit the outskirts of town (whatever town it was), and a minute later she came over the crest of the hill and the village spread out below her, nestled in a shallow river valley.

On the right along the riverbank was a small general store and gas pumps, and beyond that rose the steeple of an old, white church. Just across from the church was a post office flying American and Canadian flags. Scattered about were houses of various sizes and shapes. On her right as she went by she noticed a small, hand-painted sign in both French and English: WELCOME TO ST. BOUDIN, EST. 1876. And underneath that, in English, in smaller letters and handwritten: “Like it or leave it.”

I don’t have much of a choice, she thought. Though to be fair, the place was pretty with its light coating of fresh snow and little country houses. It looked to her as she imagined an isolated Canadian town would, content to stay the way it was and let the rest of the madly rushing world pass it by in a blur.

She stopped at the store and grabbed some groceries. A woman in her sixties punched in the numbers and took her money without a word, but she refused to let it kill her mood—the sun was shining, it was a fine day. When she got back into the car, she took a left at the next fork, since ahead of her the ground rose again and the houses grew farther and farther apart, the woods thickening until even the road disappeared on its twisting, turning way.