YOUR LIFE IS perfect.

You’re thirty-six years old and in great health. You’re thin, trim, and fit, and spend entirely too much time in front of the full-length mirror hanging on the bathroom door, admiring how good you look in that pale blue button-up shirt and black slacks. Sideburns and slightly-tousled hair make you look a bit like that fellow on television. The women would love you if they saw you. They always did.

You’ve already paid off the house you bought in Mt. Lookout, that charming eastern suburb of Cincinnati. You’ve run a successful editing business for ten years. Some of your clients have even made it to the bestseller lists, and you’re quite proud of them.

The house itself is beautiful. Ever since you were a boy you’ve held a fondness for attractive things, and your home’s clean gray siding, violet shutters, and white trim caught your eye the moment you saw it in the real estate listings. The yard is small, but you don’t care about that. Yards are for other people.

You tell yourself your life is perfect, but one thing in particular puts a damper on your mood: a windstorm blew through two days before, knocking out the power, the phone line, and the internet, and you quite literally have nothing to eat aside from a stale box of saltines perched atop your refrigerator. Your cell phone is dead. With the power still out, you have no way to charge it.

At first you’d thought it was just an ordinary windstorm. True, the house had groaned like it was about to lift off its foundation, but it was an old house, so you hadn’t worried, not even when the lights went out and plunged you into blackness. You’d patted around the kitchen until you found a dusty book of matches in the back of a drawer and then lit a candle to ward off the shadows.

It was just a power outage. You had no reason for concern. It would be back on in no time.

That was two days ago.

Two very, very long days.

Seeing as you couldn’t get any work done without electricity to power your laptop, you’d lounged around the living room with a book the next day, reading the entire thing in just a few hours in the light spilling in from the long windows. You went back up to the bathroom, took a cold shower, and put fresh gel in your hair, imagining what it would be like to invite some striking woman over who might appreciate the way you groom yourself.

Now, though, you’re still in your navy blue silk pajamas despite the fact it’s past four in the afternoon. It’s just too cold now to take another shower without the benefit of a working water heater, or to take off your clothes to put on new ones. The windstorm brought an early winter chill with it, one that’s sinking into every pore and rendering you sluggish.

Your stomach growls, and you peek through your bedroom blinds for the thousandth time. At least three immense oak trees along your street succumbed to the wind and came down across the power lines. One of them even came down on top of a bright red sports car four doors down from yours, and you’d seen the owner standing out in the street cussing the tree out as if it had turned his car into a pancake on purpose.

A crew is still working on one of the trees farther down the street. A less inept crew would have had the job done already. You feel sad that trees so old have perished, but sadder for yourself. Those trees have made you a prisoner.

Your stomach growls again—or maybe it hasn’t stopped growling. You’d planned on ordering groceries on the day the storm hit. You should have ordered them days ago. A client’s manuscript had absorbed every ounce of your attention, so you forgot.

You go downstairs and check the cabinets and pantry again to see if they miraculously spawned food overnight.

They have not.

You pluck the wall-mounted phone out of its cradle and hold it to your ear. Still no dial tone. With the lines down, you hadn’t really expected one.

Your frustration swells inside of you until you feel you must burst. You want so badly to finish those saltines, but you know you should ration them in case the phone line and power remain disconnected for another day or two.

Gary, your understanding neighbor who cuts your grass and gets your mail and takes your garbage out and to the curb, is out of town. Cabo San Lucas, he’d said. He won’t be home for days. Gary can’t help you.

The neighbors on the other side don’t speak to you, and haven’t since you moved in. Besides, you saw them leave in their car last night, presumably on their way to a place that hasn’t lost electricity.

It’s times like this when you wish your parents didn’t live so far away. Life has been harder for you since they moved to Seattle. Sometimes you wonder if you’re the reason they left.

Other times you’re sure of it.

“Jeremy, you’ve got to get out of the house,” your mother has said more times than you can count. “You’re a grown man. You can’t keep relying on other people to do things for you.”

As if you’d forgotten your age. She just doesn’t understand. No one does. They’ve never been inside your head.

It didn’t used to be like this. You used to be normal, whatever “normal” means. You had a job in an office building and took your old laptop down to the corner café every chance you got so you could work on that story that had been brewing inside of you for years. You loved the sun and the sky and the smell of fresh air. You especially loved to make yourself look nice for the young women who frequented the café. And there were plenty of women. You were an incessant flirt. Some found you an annoyance, except for one.

She started setting up her laptop near yours and would ask what you were working on, and the two of you would end up chatting for hours about stories and books and anything else you could think of.

She brought an unimaginable light to your life. Eventually you took her to dinner and a movie, and after that she rarely left your side.

Her name was Emily.

You begin to pace back and forth between the bottom of the staircase and the kitchen. You don’t want to think about Emily right now. It took you so long to banish thoughts of her and what she had meant to you from your mind. Sometimes an entire month can go by now without you thinking of her, though when she does inevitably cross your thoughts you wonder if she dwells in forgotten dreams.

A phantom twinge makes your chest hurt. You place a hand over your heart as if that will help. See, this is why it’s best to think of other things, to focus on your work. You’re not sure which hurts worse: the scars or the memories.

But aren’t memories scars in their own way?

If you were still writing stories of your own, you might have written that last thought down in a journal for later use. You only work on other people’s stories now, though. The part of you that found joy in creation died a long time ago.

In your mind you see yourself walking with Emily down near the riverbank. The day is bright, but the wind is picking up and you can see a bank of clouds rolling in from the west. Emily tells you a joke and you laugh. Nothing could ever go wrong with a life like this.

The two of you sit in the grass beneath a massive old tree to watch the barges float by on the river. You realize you’re more comfortable with this woman by your side than you’ve ever felt before. It would be nice for her to be there always, to be someone to come home to after a long day at work.

To be someone to protect like a precious gem.You shiver. It’s gotten even colder in the house. The pipes might start bursting if it drops much lower than this. Nothing you can do about that.

You go to the hall closet and stare at the dusty suit jackets and hooded sweatshirts hanging limply from the rod. When was the last time you wore any of this? You can’t quite remember.

You pull a brown hoodie off its hanger and slip it on over your long-sleeved pajama top. With a certain level of sadness, you remember that Emily gave you this hoodie as a birthday present. You consider trading it for a different one but decide against it since it’s thicker than your other sweatshirts.

If only Emily were here now. She would know exactly what to say to make you feel better and exactly what to do to solve your problem.

She would tell you to go outside.

Your chest tightens at the mere thought of leaving the house. You can’t go out there. It might happen again if you do.

You close your eyes and rub at the scar on your chest. Some days, if you’re careful not to look, you forget it’s there. It’s easy to forget things when you’re distracted by work, but now that the power outage has taken away that one outlet that allows you to forget all else, it is all creeping back to you like monsters in the night.

You go the window again for lack of anything better to do. Fat flakes of snow drift down from the sky and catch on crooked blades of grass. The clouds are gray and swollen, looking as though they might burst.

The memory of creating snow angels with Emily flashes through your mind.

You wish you could run away from the ghosts that haunt you.

You know you can’t.

“What am I going to do?” Your voice cracks as you speak. It’s been days since you’ve used it.

You check the phone for a dial tone to no avail. The lines are still down—what else did you expect?

In your mind Emily leans in to kiss you where you both lay in the snow, and your chest throbs where a bullet plunged into it on a different day when the snow was long gone.

The world is a dangerous place where cruel men walk freely and loved ones molder in tombs.

The problem with people like your parents is that they view what happened as a tragedy and nothing more, but to you it is a reality. They thought you should have moved on. You knew you couldn’t if you continued on as normal.

The only way to survive was to shut yourself away and work, work, work.

Which was fine before the power went out and allowed your demons free reign.

The house pops and cracks as the temperature continues to plummet. It sounds almost as though the whole structure wants to cave in on top of you. Wouldn’t that be something? Man who fears the sting of bullets dies in rubble instead.

A drive-by shooting on a sunny day: that’s what happened, when it all came crashing down. Neither of you ever saw it coming. Who would?

You’d bought a ring. She didn’t know yet. You’d hoped to surprise her with it when the moment was right. That moment never came.

They didn’t catch the man who did it, and no one could determine a motive. You’re sure he’s still out there somewhere, cruising around for other victims to destroy.

You’ve wondered if it wasn’t a man at all, but the devil. Since you survived him once, he might come back for you. The devil does not take kindly to being cheated.

You thought you saw him again after you were finally able to leave the hospital. You’d been walking down the sidewalk toward the café where you and Emily first met, hoping to regain some semblance of a normal life, when a white car like the one the killer drove passed by going well below the speed limit.

You don’t remember fainting. You do remember waking to find concerned strangers peering down at you. They thought you were on drugs. They didn’t know what it was like to be you. They’d never been inside your head.

Every time you went out after that, panic claimed you like a snare. You broke into hysterics in line at the bank, outside the grocery store, while getting mail. People stared accusingly as if you were someone dangerous, someone not to be trusted.

The only way to save yourself the pain and embarrassment was to not go out at all.

So you didn’t, and you haven’t—not for many years.

Your parents used to come visit before they moved away. Your mother brought casseroles and your father arrived with beer, and the three of you would sit in the living room catching up, and talk would invariably turn to The Thing.

“Jeremy, if you’re not going anywhere, why do you bother getting all dressed up?” your father asked on a day you’d worn your favorite light blue button-up shirt and splashed on aftershave for added effect. You’d done your hair as usual, too, and thought you looked quite dashing.

You’d opened your mouth and closed it a few times before saying, “Because it’s what I do. I like it this way.”

The two of them stared at you in silence for several beats. “Because Emily liked it, you mean,” your mother said.

You admit it: Emily did like the way you preen yourself, but you were doing that long before she walked into your life.

“This isn’t healthy,” your mother went on. “Shutting yourself in like this. Emily wouldn’t want you to live this way.”

Your hands tightened into pale fists. “She would if she knew it made me happy.”

You’d decided then to put all thoughts of Emily aside. Better to forget her than to remember the pain.

Now, as you freeze inside the house that had been your refuge, you wonder if it was fair of you to stop thinking of her. Emily loved you and brought unfathomable joy to your life. It would have broken her heart to be forgotten.

Tears run down your cold cheeks. You blot them on your sleeve, then hug your arms tightly over your chest for warmth. You have a fireplace; maybe you can burn some old papers on the hearth to raise the temperature a few degrees.

Then you remember you don’t have any old papers. You boxed them all up a few months ago and had Gary take them to the curb with the recycling.

“Emily, what should I do?” you ask. Your breath sends up a plume in front of your face. “I don’t want to die.”

You press your face against the icy glass and look toward the remaining fallen tree. The crew that had been working is gone, the tree is still lying across the power lines, and the snow has deepened to an inch and is steadily rising.

The sky is growing darker. It will grow even colder soon. Too cold.

You hear the rumble of an engine outside. Headlights move up the street, and an SUV pulls into the driveway across from yours. The driver—an Indian man bundled in a bright red winter coat—hops out, opens the back, and hefts firewood into his arms. His wife climbs out of the passenger seat with four bags of groceries. Both disappear into the house.

An assortment of firewood remains in the back of the SUV. These two will be warmer than you tonight. They’re probably even going to cook dinner over their fire.

Your stomach reminds you of the vacancy inside. Suddenly Emily, your long-gone Emily, is standing beside you. She places a tender hand on your cheek and says, “You know what you have to do.”

Your mind rebels at the thought. You can’t do that.

But if you don’t, you’ll freeze to death.

A whimper escapes your throat as you place a trembling hand on the doorknob.

You’re thirty-six years old. Your life really isn’t that perfect. In fact, it’s been a disaster.

Remembering the sting of bullets and the ache of loss, you step outside into the swirling snow. Emily comes with you holding your hand. You suppose she’s always been there but you’ve just been too broken to admit it.

You cross the quiet street together and knock on your neighbor’s door.