ONCE AGAIN, Leni’s parents got so drunk she had to drive them home. Back at the cabin, she parked the truck and helped Mama into her room, where she collapsed into bed, laughing as she reached for Dad.

Leni climbed up to her own bed, to the mattress they’d salvaged from the dump and cleaned with bleach, and lay beneath her army surplus blankets and tried to fall asleep.

But the incident at the saloon and the meeting with the Harlans stayed with her. Something about it was deeply unsettling, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on any one moment and say, There, that’s what bothered me. Maybe just a sense of imbalance in her dad that was, if not new, a magnification.

Change. Slight, but apparent.

Her dad was angry. Maybe furious. But why?

Because he’d been fired from the pipeline? Because he’d seen Mama and Tom Walker together in March, seen Mr. Walker sitting at their table?

It had to be something more than what it seemed. How could a few businesses in town upset him so much? God knew he liked to drink whiskey at the Kicking Moose more than most men.

She rolled over for the box by her bed, the one that held Matthew’s letters from the last few years. Not a month had gone by without word from him. She had each letter memorized and could pull them up at will. Some sentences never left her. I’m getting better … I thought of you last night when I was out to dinner, this kid had a huge Polaroid camera … I scored my first goal yesterday, I wish you’d been there … and her favorites, when he said things like, I miss you, Leni. Or, I know it sounds lame, but I dreamed of you. Do you ever dream of me?

Tonight, though, she didn’t want to think about him and how far away he was or how lonely she felt without him and his friendship. In the years he’d been gone, no new kids had moved in to Kaneq. She had learned to love Alaska, but she was lonely a lot, too. On bad days—like today—she didn’t want to read his letters and wonder if he would ever come back, and she worried that if she wrote to him, she would accidentally say what was really on her mind. I’m afraid, she might say, I’m lonely.

Instead, she opened her latest book—The Thorn Birds—and lost herself in the story of a forbidden love in a harsh and inhospitable land.

She was still reading well past midnight, when she heard the rustling of beads. She expected to hear the clank of the woodstove door opening and closing, but all she heard were footsteps moving across the wooden floor. She eased out of bed and crawled to the edge of the loft and peered down.