Nev’s mother, Nola, Saiet’s daughter, was solid-looking with a no-nonsense expression and short, dark hair like Nev’s. She went out often too, because she was a healer with her hands, through massage, and had patients who needed her. Davvi stayed home, for Davvi was a builder and no one wanted a builder in a storm. He sat in the cold, open area of the barn sometimes, sanding and hammering boards into a configuration that began to look like a dresser. Davvi had built the house, the guest rooms in the barn, all the furniture. His workmanship, when Giddon could see it in the light, was tidy, elegant, even beautiful. He had a bad knee, from a fall off a ladder long ago, but it didn’t seem to slow him down. The members of this family were clearly good with their hands.

Giddon’s hands, in contrast, were useless. There was nothing for him to do in the storm, beyond move firewood from the barn to the house, which took him all of seven minutes.

“We have some ideas about how to spy on the Cavenda house,” Saiet would say over dinner, but all the ideas were dependent on getting advice from friends and neighbors who were unlikely to emerge until after the storm.

And the storm went on and on.

—

On Thursday morning, Giddon woke to a bright blue sky, a bright white planet, and Saiet’s bright face as he shoveled a path between the house and the barn. Giddon, joining in, shoveled for hours, steady and fast, too stir-crazy to take a break.

“Giddon,” said Davvi, pausing in his own shoveling to watch Giddon decimate an icy wall of snow, “don’t you tire?”

“I’m tired,” said Giddon, not slowing down.

“You’re strong as an ox,” said Davvi, laughing. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

Giddon was trying to kill his hope, but there was no point explaining it to Davvi. When the house and the barn were shoveled out, he started on the path into the woods, but Davvi asked him to shovel a path to one of the hot pools instead.

“And then I want you to bathe in the pool,” Davvi said. “Please, Giddon, before you strain a muscle. Something’s driving you too hard.”

Davvi was right, of course. And the pool, pleasant-smelling and impossibly warm, enclosed him in an embrace he hadn’t known he needed. Maybe this water warming his skin and soothing his muscles was the answer he was looking for. Maybe the hope could run out of his body, to be swallowed by this pool.