At first, Stefan was chattering, apologizing over and over for wasting the hotel room and the food, me reassuring him, promising to make chicken noodle soup and homemade rye bread when we got home, although I could think of nothing more than lying flat on clean sheets when we got there. We stopped every torturous twenty or thirty miles, and I fell into frantic short bouts of sleep, then wakened to find snow mounded like bolster pillows against the windshield. We would get out and push the accumulation away with a plastic windshield brush until that soon broke. Then with the corner of a cardboard box I found in the trunk, and then when that got soggy, with our hands, because somehow, no one ever prepares for such a storm. The dashboard indicator read two below. So much for it being too cold to snow.

Start, then stop. Start, then stop, from noon until six that night.

Once, on a break at a truck stop, Stefan fell asleep too, and it was when a semi gave out a long blast on its air horn that we sat upright, sweating in our winter coats, spooked by how easily we could have slept on forever, our car a potential crypt flooded with carbon monoxide, banked in snow and etched with filigrees of frost. We set out again, and I told Stefan to go ahead and nap. It was only with all that suspended time that I let my mind drift back to Jill McCormack. The victim’s mother, as she was always referred to in court and on news broadcasts when she gave all those wrenching interviews about domestic violence against young women, when she first founded the organization SAY, Stop Abuse Young. I thought about what she was doing there this morning, how she must have known about the timing of Stefan’s release, wondered if she meant to speak to him or to me, then ended up driving all that long way for nothing.