05

All right,” she told the trees. “That is enough of that.”

She got up. Snow clung to her coat, her hair, the legs of her pants. She felt its cold working inward, searching seams. The muscles in her thighs shivered. The path, when she found it again, seemed narrower, a tunnel through dim green.

By the time she stepped into the clearing, the light had gone flat. The clouds pressed lower. Smoke no longer rose from the chimney. The cabin sat hunched, its roof softened with new snow, its small porch half buried.

She unlocked the door, kicked her boots against the threshold, and stepped inside. The fire was out and the air held the scent of ash and old coffee. Her breath made ghosts again. Her knees threatened mutiny as she shrugged off the pack and let it thump to the floor. For a moment she simply stood there, coat still on, hat pulled down, fingers stiff. The room felt larger than it had in the morning, its corners drawn back into shadow. Without him, the room answered itself differently.

Then the old habits returned, those quiet servants. She set wood in the stove, coaxed flame from matches, fed it until the fire settled into its busy crackle. She hung her coat on the peg, and filled the kettle again. Then she placed her hat on the shelf by the door, and slipped into the worn slippers that still remembered the shape of his toes.

The window called her. She crossed to it, hot tea in hand, the aroma of lemon and smoke rising with the steam. The glass fogged. She wiped a circle clear with the heel of her hand.

The snow had thickened. The world outside had lost its edges. The trees blurred, trunks turned to smudges, branches to faint strokes in a white field. Even the ridge had gone, only its lower slope visible, the rest lost in cloud. Somewhere up there, the ashes had begun their slow settling. They would work their way into every crevice, every thin place where wind dropped them. In spring, meltwater would carry them down through soil and stone, into the creek, to the river, to places she would never see.

I did it,” she said to the window.

If she closed her eyes, she could imagine his answer. Not as a voice, nothing so clear, but as a presence in the room. At the far chair, his hands wrapped around his own mug. Or at the stove, bent over the open door, coaxing the big log to catch. Or outside on the porch, boot soles thumping, the door about to open with its familiar rusty squeal.

She opened her eyes. The room was empty. The snow feathered down.

Alone was still alone. The promise had not changed that. There would be mornings, many, when the bed on his side stayed flat, when the coffee pot he had bought at a yard sale for five dollars brewed only for one. There would be nights when the wind came down hard from the high slopes, rattling the windows, and no second breath in the dark to keep her anchored.

She drank her tea. Heat seeped out into her chest, her arms. The fire picked up, casting a soft orange on the ceiling, making the pine boards seem abstract, the knots like little dark planets. She put her free hand on the window frame, feeling its faint chill through the paint.

Outside, the snow went on. It took the world as it found it, stone and stump, roof and mountain, and laid itself down, flake upon flake, patient as breath. Somewhere up there, in the swirl above the tree line, the man she had loved had joined its work.

“Goodbye,” she said to him, and to the life they had carried together. It settled in her like a word that finally knows its shape.

She stood at the window and watched until the light faded, until the glass mirrored the room more than the world beyond. Her own face looked back at her, lined, hair pulled away, eyes clear, someone she recognized and nearly mistook for a stranger. Behind that reflection, the snow kept falling, soft and unhurried

The end

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