It was five after three when he got to Marty’s place and parked the truck right where it had been. Not that it mattered. The relentless snow had done a lot of work for him, and it would be a first if someone like Marty, who had trouble remembering his name, noticed the pick-up was three inches away from where he left it last night. He waited breathlessly to see if the truck’s return would make those dark windows above the porch roof, light up into yellow squares of enquiry. When it didn’t, he pocketed the keys, closed the door as silently as a thief, and headed back home.

Maybe he should have gone on up to Hawk’s. What the hell was he playing at? All that way for nothing. If he had another blackout up there, so what? Hawk could call for help. Sam was in turmoil, no longer sure what he wanted or why, what he was thinking or if it made sense.

But he was doing a careful and constant job of keeping that big black thought out of his mind. The big insistent one that said, people die when you’re out cold, my boy. Yes, they do. People have died every single fucking time.

No. That wasn’t true. Not this time. This time he hadn’t gotten out of the goddamn truck. No one was dead and there was no room for a thought as despicable as that. All he knew was that he was creeping around his own neighbourhood after three in the morning like a tom cat.

It was beautiful in the still streets. All these timber houses, blue and yellow and pink, coated with white snow like confections. And the people sleeping in those big safe wooden cradles were good people he liked. That was the Ritchies’ house there. Billy played with their son Dillon and Katie could rarely get away from that house without an armful of jars of preserved things they could never quite identify.

And ahead, in the three-storey house that was way too big for them, that was where Pat and Benny lived. Block Parents who had no kids. Their little round Block Parent sticker in the window was like a declaration of defiance in the face of their infertility. He saw Pat’s face when she opened the door to the kids that abused the sticker by asking for the bathroom and cookies instead of help in a crisis. It wasn’t a face annoyed by the intrusion and exploitation, but a face that said she ached to wrap them in her arms and own them. It wasn’t fair. They were such good people.

It struck Sam that he was reminiscing. That was exactly what he was doing. Thinking about his friends and neighbours as if they were dead and gone. Or he was.