"Do you want to hike tomorrow if the trail's clear?" Daniel asked.
"Yes," Elise said. "And I want to stop at that overlook Natalie liked. Not as a shrine. As a place. We can eat granola bars and be cold and come down again."
"Toby will complain about the granola bars."
"Toby will survive."
They smiled at each other the way people do when the joke is small and the survival is not.
On the first evening, snow still lingering in the shaded places, Daniel sat by the fire with a trail map. Elise unpacked groceries. Toby ran through the room with a pinecone and announced he was ready for everything. No one wore a stranger's sunglasses. The past did not vanish; it took a seat near the hearth and stopped shouting.
Elise paused at the counter and looked at her husband — dark-blond hair, blue eyes, stubble, wedding band, charcoal thermal shirt — and felt the complicated love of someone who had seen the scaffolding behind the house and chosen, again, to live inside it while demanding better carpentry.
"Wrong vacation, buddy," Daniel told Toby when the boy asked if they could drive to a beach tomorrow, and Toby groaned, and Elise smiled despite herself.