Leni pulled off her face mask and shoved it in her pocket, then started up the chain saw, the wa-na-na-na excruciatingly loud out here.

She pointed the blade downward, stuck it in the hole, and began the long, arduous process of turning the hole into a big square opening in the ice.

When Leni finished, she was sweating hard. Mama dropped the animal traps beside the hole. They landed with a clank.

Then Mama went back for Dad. Grabbing hold of his cold white hands, she dragged him over to the hole, tucked him up close to it.

Dad’s body was stiff and still, his face as white and hard as a tusk carving.

For the first time, Leni really thought about what they were doing. The bad thing they’d done. From now on, they would have to live with the knowledge that they were capable of this, all of it. The shooting, the carrying of a dead man, the covering up of a crime. Although they’d had a lifetime of covering up for him, looking away, pretending, this was different. Now they were the criminals and the secret Leni had to protect was her own.

A good person would feel ashamed. Instead she was angry. Howlingly so.

If only they had walked away years ago, or called the police, asked for help. Any small course correction on Mama’s part might have led to a future where there wasn’t a dead man on the ice between them.

Mama dragged the traps apart, forced the black jaws open. She pushed Dad’s forearm into the maw. The trap closed with a snap of breaking bone. Mama paled, looking sick. Traps broke both of Dad’s legs—sn-ap—became weights.

The northern lights appeared overhead, cascading in swirls of yellow, green, red, and purple. Impossible, magical color; lights fell like silken scarves across the sky, skeins of yellow, neon-green, shocking pink. The electric-bright moon seemed to watch it all.

Leni stared down at her father. She saw the man who had used his fists when he was angry, saw the blood on his hands and the mean set to his jaw. But she saw the other man, too, the one she’d crafted from photographs and her own need, the one who’d loved them as much as he could, his capacity for love destroyed by war. Leni thought maybe that he would haunt her. Not just him, but the idea of him, the sad and scary truth that you could love and hate the same person at the same time, that you could feel a deep and abiding loss and shame for your own weakness and still be glad that this awful thing had been done.

Mama dropped to her knees beside him, bent close. “We loved you.”

She looked up at Leni, wanting—maybe needing—Leni to say the same thing, to do what Leni had always done. Peas in a pod.