What you put in your heart will make you hurt. But it will be the most spectacular kind of hurt. It will light you up and burn you. It will knock you down. It will break you apart.

And it will make you different.

Doyle unlatched the briefcase from Bardem’s snowmobile and set it on the snow.

“You’re bein’ too hard on yourself,” Midge said.

She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. He stood with his hands crossed in front of him. He looked at her.

She said, “We’re gonna find Bardem.”

They stood there. The sunlight in the trees, bouncing off the snow. The cold stack of firewood and the coals. After a little while, Doyle said: “I always thought I could fix things. Whatever trouble came along in this world. Well, I was wrong about it.”

“You couldn’t fix this.”

“I could’ve followed her tracks better.”

“Maybe you oughta ease up on yourself.”

He kept looking at the briefcase. A shudder in his chest. His whole head was numb. He looked off into the trees. “She got away from him. How’d she do that?”

“I didn’t know there was a way.”

They stood with the briefcase between them. On the snow, the trail of blood and the tracks led into the woods. After a while, Doyle said, “I get why he left the snowmobile. How loud it is. Easy to hear. But why leave the money?”

Midge pulled down her hat. “Maybe he didn’t want to leave it. Maybe it was too heavy to carry. He was bleedin’ pretty bad.”

“Or maybe somethin’ else.”

“Somethin’ else like what?”

“Like sometimes you realize that the thing you wanted all this time isn’t what you really wanted.”

She stood watching him. Then she spoke, softly.

“I guess we all learn that. Sometime or other. Every one of us.”

I

People say you shouldn’t look back.

But I do look back,

and I am glad.

They stayed at the hospital for three days. When Jack wheeled Matty out the front doors, he looked down the road and then back at the hospital. A truck was coming. It was snowing lightly, and Jack just stood by the road and waited, holding the wheelchair. Doyle got out and came around and opened the passenger door.

“Well,” he said. “Get in.”

Jack lifted Matty into the truck. His golden hair stood up at angles. Matty looked at the sun peeking between clouds in the sky. He said, “It’s a nice day.”

Is it? Jack hoped so.

They went up a plowed drive, and Doyle parked in front of the house. The falling snow drifting about the car. Doyle got out. Jack collected Matty in the blanket and set him on his feet. “Hold on to my hand,” he said.