“Knox.”
“It’s the right call. One less mouth. One less person who needs a cot. You have fourteen people. You needed to be at ten. I am the buffer.”
“That’s not true.”
“The answer is still no.”
I walked out before Beckham could answer again. I got my coat from the locker. I walked to my truck in the parking lot where the snow was already halfway up the wheels and the world had gone quiet the way it goes quiet right before something changes.
I sat in the cab with the engine off for ten seconds. Ten seconds to understand what I was doing. I was leaving. I was abandoning the place I had been hired to be. I was choosing her over the team. I was choosing chaos over structure.
I started the engine.
I drove home through the historic blizzard that was arriving faster than the National Weather Service had predicted. The windshield wipers did not help much. The road was already becoming something abstract — a suggestion of direction rather than a demarcation. I had grown up in Minnesota. I had driven through worse. But not for a long time. Not since the day my brother died in a car that could not find the road in weather much like this.
The drive took twenty-two minutes. Twenty-two minutes of nothing but white and wind and the knowledge that I was making a choice that would change things.
I parked in the driveway of Maple’s house and sat in the cab with the engine running and the heater high and my left hand resting on the steering wheel.
The kitchen light was on. This meant she was still awake. This meant she had found the mudroom. This meant she was standing in her house understanding that a man had come into her space and prepared her for disaster.
The apartment light was off. This meant she had not gone looking for me. This meant she was not ready for that conversation yet.
I sat there for a long minute, counting the seconds between the porch light flickering and the wind hitting the window. Six seconds. Five. Four. Three. Two. The intervals were getting shorter.
The flickering was getting faster.
The wind was getting worse.
I turned off the engine.
I did not get out of the truck. I sat in the dark and the cold and watched the light in the kitchen window, and I did not allow myself to think about the fact that I had driven away from the team shelter, away from the place I had been hired to be, away from the only structure that made sense, because the thought of this woman spending three days in the dark was something my body could not tolerate.
I put the truck in park.
I waited.
I did not know what I was waiting for. Permission, maybe. Or proof that the supplies had been found. Or some sign that what I had done mattered.
When the kitchen light stayed on past midnight, I understood that she was still awake, still probably standing in the mudroom looking at a pyramid of cans and trying to work out the mathematics of where they came from. Who had gone to the store. What it meant that a man she barely knew had thought about her survival.
I put my head on the steering wheel.
I stayed that way until my neck hurt and the cold was creeping through the cab like something alive.
Then I got out of the truck and walked to the side stairs of the apartment, and I went inside, and I turned on the heater as high as it would go, and I lay on the bed that was too small for me and listened to the wind and waited for whatever happened next.
5
MAPLE
My breath was visible.
That was the first thing I noticed when I woke up. Not the silence, though the silence was there — the kind of silence that only happens when the power goes out, when the hum of the house shuts off like someone stopped breathing in the dark. Not the cold, though the cold was there too, creeping across the back of my neck, making the quilt feel like it was made of concrete instead of down. Not even the dark, which was almost complete except for the gray wash of snow-light coming through the window and touching nothing.
It was my breath. I was lying in my bed in my grandmother’s house in a town in Minnesota that had just gotten buried under eighteen inches of weather, and my breath was coming out in clouds, and my lungs were getting a lesson in what heating costs when the grid fails. My breath was visible because the house had stopped being warm. My breath was visible because I was alone.
Or I was supposed to be alone.
