The story becomes a huge success and Robert finds himself swept into a new world far from his wife and home. In time Robert loses track of the things he loves most . . . until he meets a stranger who begins telling him intimate details about his past, his present, and most important, the brevity of his future. Thinking that he has just months to live, Robert begins to discover the truth about himself: who he has become, what he has lost, and what it will take for him to find love again.

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It’s Christmas night.

Outside my hotel window the world is snow. All is still and white or on the way to becoming so. Only the streetlamps show sign of life, changing colors above barren streets that look more like tundra than asphalt. Even the rumbling, yellow snowplows that wake me from my thoughts cannot keep up with the storm.

This snowstorm seems as relentless as any I’ve seen in Salt Lake City. Salt Lakers are particularly proud of their blizzards, and every native has a story of winter—stories that usually begin, You call this a storm? and grow in the telling like battle tales shared by graying war veterans. It’s a peculiar character flaw to those of us from cold climates that we feel superior to those who have the sense to live elsewhere.

I remember a Christmas night, when I was a boy, that there was a great blizzard. My father was always through with Christmas weeks before it arrived, and by Christmas night he had already undressed our tree and dragged it out to the curb for the municipal pickup. A storm came that same night, chased by the plows, and the next morning the tree was buried beneath a five-foot snowbank. We forgot about the tree until April, when a thaw revealed an evergreen branch poking free from the melting snow. It was the same Christmas that my mother left us.

Tonight, from my seventh-story window, I see a man in a parka and a bellman’s cap shoveling the walk in front of the hotel’s entrance. The snow returns nearly as fast as he clears it. Salt Lake’s own Sisyphus.

It’s a night to be home. A night to be gathered with loved ones around brick hearths and hot drinks warming the day’s memory. It is a night to bathe in the pleasant aftermath of the season’s joy. So why am I alone in a hotel when my wife, Allyson, and my daughter, Carson, are just minutes away?

I see a car below. It moves slowly up Main Street, its headlights cutting through the darkness. The car slides helplessly from side to side, its wipers blurring, its wheels spinning, correcting, grasping, connecting, then slipping again. I imagine the driver of that car; blinded, afraid to stop, just as fearful to proceed. I empathize. Behind the wheel of my life I feel like that driver.

I couldn’t tell you my first wrong step. I’m not sure that I could tell you what I’d do differently. My mind is a queue of questions. Most of them are about the stranger. Why did the stranger come to me? Why did he speak of hope when my future, or what’s left of it, looks as barren as the winter landscape? Some might think that my story began with the stranger. But in truth it began long before I met him, back on a balmy June day eight years ago when Allyson, not yet my wife, went home to Oregon to see her father. This is strangely ironic to me, because it all began on a perfect day. And here it ends on the worst of days.