He was sitting beside Peter on a fallen log, its rotted bark blackened with dampness. No one had spoken a word in at least an hour. The others were scattered around, all except Alicia, who had gone ahead to scout the terrain. Hollis knifed open a can and begun to spoon the contents to his mouth, some kind of shredded meat. A bit got caught in the coarse tangle of his beard; he wiped it away, washed the last of his meal down with a long, throat-pumping drink of water, and passed the can to Peter.

Peter took the can and ate. Sara, sitting across from him with her back against a tree, was writing in her book. She paused, her eyes focused intently at what she’d written; her pencil was just a nub, almost too short to hold. While Peter watched, she drew her blade from her belt, scraped it across the tip, and then resumed her patient scribbling.

“What are you writing about?”

Sara shrugged, hooking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “The snow. What we ate, where we slept.” She lifted her face to the trees, squinting into the sunlight descending through the sodden branches. “How beautiful it is here.”

He felt himself smile. How long had it been since he’d smiled?

“I guess it is, isn’t it?”

A new feeling seemed to have come over Sara since they’d left the farmstead, Peter thought, an unhurried calm. It was as if she had decided something and, in so doing, had moved more deeply into herself, into a state beyond worry or fear. He felt a flicker of regret; watching her now, he realized how foolish he’d been. Her hair was long and matted, her face and bare arms streaked with grime. Her nails were blackened with crescents of dirt. And yet she’d never looked more radiant. As if all that she had seen had become a part of her, infusing her with a glowing stillness. It wasn’t a small thing, to love a person. That was the gift she had offered him, had always offered him. And yet he had refused it.

Sara met his eyes then. She cocked her head in puzzlement. “What?”

He shook his head, embarrassed. “Nothing.”

“You were staring.”

Sara shifted her gaze to Hollis; the corners of her mouth lifted in a quick flash of a smile. Just a moment, but Peter felt it keenly, the invisible line of connection between the two of them. Of course. How could he have been so blind?

“It wasn’t anything,” he managed. “Just … you looked happy, sitting there. It surprised me is all.”

Alicia emerged from the brush. Balancing her rifle against a tree, she retrieved a can from the pile of packs and bladed it open, frowning at the contents.