Karo slips a sleeping pill under her tongue and tucks in at one end of the couch, eyes closed, but Maeve eventually makes up a bed for herself on the floor, cushions from all the armchairs in a fat row and the duvet she rescued earlier in the day over the top. She can’t sleep and lies there breathing. Listening to Karo breathe. There’s no way to know what time it is. Midnight? Earlier? Later? By now the others will have reached the village, Maeve thinks. If the village is still there. If there is something or someone to reach. Above her on the couch, Karo twitches and murmurs, sinks further into her blankets, falls into sleep-breath. The fire keeps burning away and Maeve gets up and goes to the back door for more wood, then just stays there, staring out into the night.

It’s snowing again, but only lightly. Fat, full flakes. Wind skims the trees, the promise of a new squall approaching. The moon hidden for the moment by clouds.

Standing in a dark window always gives Maeve the feeling she’s being watched—even here, in the middle of nowhere, with no one else around, no one maybe for miles. Another leftover anxiety. She resents it.

Iain. Always Iain: in the grocery parking lot, or standing by the school’s chain-link fence, or under the maple in Maeve’s backyard. Iain at the window. On her porch. At her door.

Her neighbor, an old lady, telling her how charming he was: he’d left Maeve a bouquet, two dozen roses. Maeve broke down and filed a report. The police told her they’d speak to him.

But the problem, the cop said, calling back the next day, is he’s just not over you yet. He’s still in love, he says. Before hanging up, he reminds her: It’s hard for a man. You’ve taken his children.

He waited outside her house the night before he died—the night before he got on a plane that put him in the wrong city at the wrong time. Maeve in the rocking chair at her kitchen window, keeping watch; Iain in a black rental car, parked at the curb.

July. High summer, a heat warning, and all of Maeve’s windows and doors locked tight. She didn’t dare to let the cat out. She didn’t dare to open the door even for that. She’d signed for a registered letter early in the day, then opened it to find a court file number, a date.

He’d never get custody, her lawyer assured her. Almost certainly not.

So then why go to court?

Because fighting him would cost Maeve everything.