“I tramp around all day making myself ready for you, I go, I sit in the woods, I shiver, I collect snow on my shoulders like it’s gold, I think, I say, Anytime now, and all the while you’re nowhere to be found. Now, finally, I come home, I put in the trouble to get myself ready for bed, and just like that, here you are.”

“I did not appoint the time of our meeting, Dvorah Leah.”

“Oh, get out of here. No one’s called me Dvorah Leah in forty years.”

“It is your name.”

“I don’t care. Take it if you want it.”

“I am afraid not, Dvorah Leah.”

“Hey,” said Bluma’s bubbe. “Hey, did you do something to my cat?”

“I know nothing of your cat.”

“Sure you don’t.”

“I do not lie,” said the stranger.

“What, I’m supposed to believe that?”

The stranger sighed. “It is entirely immaterial to me what you believe, Dvorah Leah. I am here to do you a service.”

“Bah,” said Dvorah Leah. “Some service.”

“You would be sorry if I were not able to perform it for you,” said the stranger. “Believe me.”

“I thought what I believed was immaterial.”

Floorboards creaked as weight was shifted from foot to foot. “Take my counsel: You begin only once and end only once. There is no reward or exception for the irreverent.”

Bluma’s brows began to fold. End? What did she mean, end?

Dvorah Leah laughed. “You think I should be reverent? What have I ever been given that I should be reverent?”

“Life, Dvorah Leah,” said the stranger, and the word fell like a heavy load dropped at the end of a long workday. “Life.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Dvorah Leah. “Do you have any real knowledge of what you’re talking about?”

There was no response. Beyond the window, the wind flexed its muscles.

“No,” said Dvorah Leah. “I didn’t think so. I’ll tell you what: why don’t you go away and live a lifetime’s worth of pain, of fear and want and intimidation and abandonment and betrayal and disappointment, and then you can come back here and tell me how I ought to be reverent. How dare you.”

For a long moment, the house was silent.

Presently, the Dark Messenger spoke. “It is not given to me to form judgments.”

“No,” said Dvorah Leah. “Of course not. You’re, what, just the messenger?”

“I prune the tree so that it may grow.”

“Oh, go piss into the wind. What, did you come up with that while you were killing an actual gardener?”

Suddenly Bluma’s heart began to race.

Killing?

“I do not kill,” said the stranger. “I retrieve what otherwise might be lost.”

“Ah,” said Dvorah Leah. “So you’re like a dog, then—like a filthy dog.”

Slowly, the voice of the stranger began to shift like a gathering storm.