Breathing broke inside the darkness. Peter didn’t dare reach out to touch in case something other than Cooper reached back and grabbed him. And yet, his being there almost became a comfort. At least Cooper was looking at him. And in the darkness of that blank space, where not even a silhouette or a glint of light in the eye marked him out from the door, Peter found that he could paint pictures of the Cooper he wanted. One with a freshly pressed tee and shoeshine on his boots ready for the movies. Or one with a smile in his eyes having made promotion at work. Any of those would do. It didn’t really matter which. Just as long as Cooper’s lips transformed his stupid name into wonder and his eyes brimmed with all his hopes and dreams again, ready to unpack everything he had inside him now he’d found a home in a little place called Peter.

Peter pulled one of Cooper’s old T-shirts from beneath his pillow, inhaling the sweet tang of log smoke and sweat in the pits and stared into the darkness of the door. “Where are you?” he whispered. “Where did you go?” Finally. “Come back to me.”

A dash of light struck the floor, illuminating tufts of weave in the carpet again as the door swung open. Peter stood, looking down the length of the front room. Once again, there had been no sound of the handle turning. The door was just open. There were no footsteps crossing the floorboards to the front door. Cooper was just gone. Peter rushed to the window looking down over Mainstreet. But Cooper wasn’t down there either. Only footprints in the snow.

Enough. Peter threw his parka over the top of his pyjamas and ran out on to the sidewalk. The neon lights of Mainstreet were out. The shop windows were dark. Overhead, the little light bulbs clinked dully on their strings beneath the weight of the snow. Peter held back a moment, waiting to see if he could hear movement in the still of the night. But there was nothing.

He stepped out on to the road, his eye following the footprints all the way up towards the foothills at the edge of town. At the very end of Mainstreet, snow falling inside a shaft of light from the last of the streetlamps, fell back into place like something had just passed through it barely seconds before. Beyond it, the snowy pines of the foothills were blue. Peter inched forward, suddenly aware of the night and the cold and those things inside the trees he couldn’t see. Wolves, perhaps. Restless Ones. Secrets. He was about to turn back, when a square of yellow light from one of the guest rooms above the diner struck the sidewalk below and he glanced up.