There’s something about the enveloping whiteness of a blizzard that makes you hallucinate. I had the strangest visions out there, of snowy owls, of bodies in the road, of my mother floating in the sky like an angel. I felt the beginnings of a deep depression, as if the emptiness of the blizzard had begun to mirror the emptiness in my soul. I’d felt that way only once before, a hollowness that had dogged me for weeks. There were days during that stretch when I didn’t get out of bed all day. I remember it had felt like I held a gun in my hand, and one by one, my brain was shooting down the things that mattered to me. I had never experienced a scarier time than that. I realized my only two choices were to die or start living again. I chose life, and after surviving that summer of discontent, I found the will to go on. That same depression had never come back to me, not like that, but I could feel it out there again. I could see it in the snow cloud, coming for me.

Ninety minutes later, I crossed the county line and made it to the hospital where they’d taken Will. He was unconscious. His face was barely recognizable, his black-and-blue eyes swollen shut, his head bandaged, one arm in a cast. This happy, handsome teenager, a boy I’d known since he was a baby, had been sitting next to me in my house the previous night. A day later, here he was, clinging to life. I sat by the bed and took his hand, and all I could do was tell him in a low voice how sorry I was.

“Who did it?”

I looked up and saw Norm standing by the curtain that divided the room. He had a cup of hospital coffee in his hand, and he looked as if he’d aged a decade in a few hours.

“What?”

“Who did it?” he asked me. “Who told everyone about Will? I know it wasn’t you, Rebecca.”

“Of course not.”

“Then who?” He sat down in the chair next to me. “Ajax?”

“Let it go, and focus on Will,” I said.

Norm shook his head, as if letting go was an impossible thing. He stared at his son, with his face frozen into a mask of helplessness and hatred. “My whole life has been about the law, you know? How to get things done within the system. And now the system is worthless. Ajax put a target on my son’s chest, and there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s no law. There’s nothing. I just want to kill the son of a bitch.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” I murmured.

Norm’s face twitched. As he sipped his coffee, he began to cry silently. I’d never seen him cry before.