“How much do you know about hypothermia?” she asks. Impatient, but resigned now to the conversation. When Maeve says nothing, she keeps on. “She probably threw them off herself. At the very end, before death—your body tries this last, wild solution. Your capillaries open wide. Blood rushes to the surface, to your skin. Suddenly it feels like you’re burning up instead of freezing. You might strip off your clothes. Lots of people do,” she says. “Don’t think I haven’t considered all the possibilities.” She leans in sharply. “But I didn’t see what happened to Anna. And neither did you.”

Maeve pulls back, chastened.

“No,” she says. “No, of course not. It’s just—” She shakes her head, as though the action could dispel the tension in the room. It sometimes feels like the years she spent with Iain—and, later, hiding from him—have made her into a woman she doesn’t like: anxious. Frightened, even. “I guess I’m thinking about her, that’s all. She was so focused on those dreams, the bear dreams I had. Maybe they predicted something?” It’s a naive thing to say, both flimsy and somehow very true. “She thought of them as transformative. Or, I mean, that’s how she imagined them to be.”

“Did she?” Karo blinks at her. “Anna was a filmmaker, not a spiritualist. She was interested in capturing those dreams, in using them herself—as images.” She rolls her eyes. “Spiritualism.” The change in tone suits her; she switches feet, working the cramp out of the other arch. “You’d have to believe that dreams find us, everything happens for a reason, blah-blah…do you really believe all that?” She looks down at her own hand, trembling there against her sock foot, then back to Maeve. “No. Dreams are only fragments. Physical fragments in the brain. That’s their value. We use them to work out what’s past—and practice for the future. Practice! Not predictions. We say: Trust your instinct,” she says. “Instinct is what shows up when you’ve learned something over and over, from experience. You know more than you think, Maeve.” There’s a silence, and then that slightly hawkish look again. “In dreams, you always know what to do. Don’t you?”

The question comes out low and serious, and they stare at each other for a long moment. Then the fire dims, and Maeve adds a little more kindling to it, shoring it up.

She doesn’t answer.

There’s a new brightness outside, the clouds thinning for long enough to let moonlight hit all that white, acres and acres of snow. They don’t talk about whether to sleep or try waiting up in the hope that a dig-out crew might arrive in the night. They just watch as the light moves, the moon rising far above them, until the silence is too much to bear.