"I thought I had an hour," Ellen said. "The sky looked undecided. I've written three pieces about reading mountain weather and apparently learned nothing from any of them."
"Reading weather is different from believing it," Ray said. "Belief is what gets people hurt. Reading is just information."
Ellen flexed her toes inside the boot he had loosened. Pain flared and subsided. She thought of the compass on the table between them, brass catching gold light, and of the man in Denver who was supposed to receive it—Marcus Hale, her editor at Horizon magazine, fifty-two years old, divorced twice, the person who had first published her when she was twenty-six and raw with ambition and a stack of essays no one wanted. Marcus had given her the compass three years ago after a disastrous assignment in the Canadian Rockies where she had nearly walked herself off a cornice in fog so thick the world had reduced itself to the sound of her own breathing. *So you'll always know which way home is,* he had said, and she had laughed because home, then, had been a studio apartment in Boulder with a leaky faucet and a typewriter with a sticky letter R. She had meant to return the gift tonight, rewrapped, as a quiet goodbye. Horizon was folding her travel column. Marcus had found her a staff job in New York—features, steady pay, no more freelancing from borrowed desks in towns whose names she spelled wrong in first drafts. She was supposed to catch a flight from Durango the day after Christmas. The compass was meant to say: thank you, and I don't need this anymore, and maybe neither do you.