Ellen looked at the window, at the snow that still erased the world as thoroughly as any editor's pen. "I don't know. Last night I thought the answer was New York and a salary and my mother's relief. This morning I'm less certain about answers. Certainty feels like the thing that put me on that ridge alone."
Ray set the compass down between them, equidistant, a small brass country claimed by neither. "Claire gave me a compass once. Different one. Plastic. Orange. From a gas station outside Cortez where we stopped for coffee and bad sandwiches. She said I had a talent for walking in circles when I was thinking too hard about trail grades and timber. I lost it in the same avalanche that took her. Or I think I did. I looked for it in the spring among the things the mountain returned—gloves, a bent pole, someone's thermos—and never found it. Funny what the mountain keeps. Funny what it decides is enough."
Ellen reached across the table and touched the brass lid with one fingertip, feeling the cool metal, the engraved suggestion of initials worn soft. "Then this one can stay here for a while. If you want. Borrowed, like the cabin. Until the weather clears enough to know who it belongs to."