"I changed the names," Ellen agreed. "Some weather should stay between the people who survived it."
He tapped the brass compass, which had migrated that year from the drawer to the windowsill, where the morning light could find the inscription and the needle alike. "Good," he said. "Some things should stay between us and the snow."
And they did. The mountain kept its cabin. The compass kept its north. And every so often, when a blizzard came in hard enough to erase the roads and make the radio speak mostly in static, Ray Callahan still went out in the red parka with the plain white cross, and Ellen Whitmore still left a light in the window of the house at the edge of town, and neither of them mistook the arrangement for destiny—only for gravity, and weather, and the choices you make when both of those things turn, and someone, somewhere, is still following the unfinished story home.