Sleep came in pieces, the way sleep comes when pain and novelty and weather share a bed. Ellen dreamed of skiing through rooms that were also mountains, hallways that opened onto cornices, and of a brass needle that pointed not north but toward a door she had not yet opened, a door with a kerosene glow behind it. Ray slept the thin sleep of men who listen for wind changes and radio calls and the particular silence that means a roof has taken too much weight. When he woke near two, according to the glowing hands of his watch, the fire had burned down to a bed of coals, and he rebuilt it quietly with the birch and pine he had stacked within reach, then stood at the window where a small clear patch remained above the drifted snow. He wiped the glass with his sleeve. The sky was still sealed. No stars. No moon. Only the cabin's golden light thrown back at him from the pane, and behind him the soft shape of a woman breathing, ankle wrapped, hair spilled across a folded jacket that had been meant for a different kind of evening.
He looked at Claire's photograph. For the first time in three Christmases, the looking did not hollow him out completely. It hurt—of course it hurt; hurt was not a switch—but the hurt sat beside something else, something like the first thaw that does not yet mean spring but means the ice has heard a rumor of water and has not dismissed it entirely. He thought of Claire's laugh on that ridge in the photograph, how she had hated having her picture taken and loved the mountains too much to refuse the record of being in them. He thought of the plastic gas-station compass she had given him, orange and ridiculous, and of searching for it in the spring melt among the debris of the slide, finding gloves and a bent pole and a thermos without its cup, never finding the compass, as if the mountain had decided to keep one small joke for itself.
He sat back down in the chairs and pulled the blanket to his chin. On the table, the brass compass waited with its lid open, needle steady, as if it had opinions about unfinished stories too.