Leni pulled a scarf out of her pack and coiled it around her neck, covering the lower half of her face. “No one will see me, Mama, but I’m going.”

“Be at the Glass Lake counter in forty minutes,” Mama answered. “Not one minute late. Okay?”

“We’re going to fly? How?”

“Just be there.”

Leni nodded. Honestly, she didn’t care about details. All she could think about was Matthew. She hefted her backpack and took off, walking as fast as she dared on the icy dock. This early on a cold and snowy November morning, there was no one out here to see her.

She reached the care facility and slowed. Here was where she needed to be careful. She couldn’t let anyone see her.

The glass doors whooshed open in front of her.

Inside, she smelled disinfectant and something else, metallic, astringent. At the front desk, a woman was on the phone. She didn’t even look up when the doors opened. Leni slipped inside, thinking, Be invisible … The corridors were quiet this early in the morning, the patients’ doors were closed. At Matthew’s room she paused, steadied herself, and opened the door.

His room was quiet. Dark. No machines whooshed or thunked. Nothing was keeping him alive except his own huge heart.

They had positioned him so that he was asleep sitting up, his head trapped in the halo thing that was attached to a vest so he couldn’t move. His pink-scarred face looked like it had been stitched together with a sewing machine. How could he live this way, stitched up, bolted together, unable to speak or think or touch or be touched? And how could she leave him to do it without her?

She dropped her backpack to the floor, approached the bed, and reached for his hand. His skin, once rough from gutting fish and fixing farm equipment, was now as soft as a girl’s. She couldn’t help thinking about their school days, holding hands under the desk, passing notes back and forth, thinking the world could be theirs.

“We could have done it, Matthew. We could have gotten married and had a kid too soon and stayed in love.” She closed her eyes, imagining it, imagining them. They could have stuck it out to the gray years, been a couple of white-haired old people in out-of-date clothes, sitting on a porch under the midnight sun.

Could have.

Useless words. Too late.

“I can’t let my mom be alone. And you have your dad and your family and Alaska.” Her voice broke on that. “You don’t know who I am anyway, do you?”

She bent down closer. Her hand closed tightly around his. Tears landed on his cheek and caught on the raised pink scar tissue.