One

Mark Fife was being watched.

He realized this in a coffee shop three blocks from the townhouse where he and his girlfriend, Allison, lived, sitting in a stuffed chair with his back to the front window. It was early on a weekday morning; all of central Ohio had woken to four inches of new snow, and Mark and Allie had decided to take a morning walk, ending here. Just before rush hour, the Cup O’Joe was full, noisy, the air warm and humid from snow melting off scores of boots. Allison had left Mark alone to use the restroom, and he was pretending to read the Dispatch while he waited. And then came the prickle at his neck, the sudden shock—as though a sly lover had drawn the tip of a fingernail across the short hairs of his nape.

He lifted his eyes from the paper and scanned the shop, but no one was looking his way. Then he turned around in his seat and was startled again: A woman—a stranger—was peering through the window at him.

The woman was older than he was, forty-five maybe. Her face was round, unnaturally tan for December, and wrapped in a silver scarf; what hair escaped was curly and very dark. Her eyes were wide: she seemed surprised to see him, in a way he recognized, and that soured his stomach.

Mark might have ignored her, but the woman was too odd—too nervous and frenetic—to ignore. Her mouth hung open; her gloved hands were twisting together in front of her. She wasn’t simply surprised to see him. She was afraid.

He raised his hand, automatically, and she flinched—as though, instead of waving, he’d held up a gun.

Was she really afraid of him? He turned back to the shop, but the only other person in the woman’s line of sight was a young blonde, wrapped in a shawl on a nearby couch, frowning at her textbook.

When Mark turned back to the window, the woman had vanished.

He stood, peered out onto the sidewalk. At that moment maybe a dozen people milled outside, all dressed in dark coats, converging and scattering, getting in and out of cars, puffing steam. The silver scarf, that hair—he searched for them, but saw nothing. The woman was gone.

He dropped back into his seat, trying to place her, failing. He told himself that she must have made a mistake. She’d thought he was someone else. Or she could simply be a crazy; Columbus had its share. Still, her appearance and departure left Mark oddly shaken, maybe because the strange woman was of a piece with a morning that had already done its best to unnerve him.

Not forty minutes before, Allison had woken him from an endless nightmare—the pressure of her fingers in his hair as gentle, as unreal, as the sensation that had alerted him to the strange woman’s gaze.

It snowed, Allie had said, when he’d opened his eyes. Come see.

Mark had been dreaming of his son, Brendan, who had died on a cold January day several years before, just weeks after his seventh birthday. The dream was an enemy whose tactics were familiar, intimate. In it, Mark and Brendan’s mother—Mark’s ex-wife, Chloe—were still living in their old two-story brick house in Victorian Village, on the far side of downtown. In the dream their old, rambling home had become a labyrinth: Floors had traded places; new hallways branched into shadows; doors had been smoothed over into plaster walls. Brendan was still alive, running from them, laughing, calling them, always out of sight, but in this strange new house they could never catch him; they could never tell him to be careful, to wait for them, to take his time on the stairs.

And then Mark was awake, and seven years had passed, and instead of Chloe’s tear-streaked, panicked face beside him, he saw only Allison’s peering down at him, her dark eyes alight, excited by the snowfall.

Allie had spent the first eight years of her life in Southern California; even after more than two decades in Cleveland and Columbus, snow was still exotic to her, special. Whatever Ohio doesn’t have, she liked to say, it’s got snow and fireflies.

Get dressed, she urged him. Come play with me.

He didn’t want to. Allie knew about Brendan, about Chloe, as much as he could bear to tell her—but how could he make her understand that a second ago Brendan had been lost, that Chloe had been crying? That even though Mark was awake, he could still hear them?

He couldn’t make her—anyone—understand a thing like that. So he dressed, pulled on his boots, and did as Allie asked.

They lived in German Village, an old, historic neighborhood just south of downtown Columbus; they’d moved into their brownstone townhouse the previous summer, six months after they’d begun dating. The streets here were cobbled, and the brick houses were all a hundred years old, squared and serious and rising porchless from the streets; the sidewalks were overhung by enormous, steadfast trees. This morning’s snow, flat and heavy, gave the air a weird closeness, as though Mark and Allie walked across a soundstage. Strings of white Christmas lights glowed in their neighbors’ windows—but not yet in their own; they’d been too busy with work to decorate—and on the light poles at the corners. If not for the single set of tire tracks dividing the road, Mark wouldn’t have been surprised to see a horse-drawn carriage clattering by.

Allie kicked at the snow, shrieked away from clumps shed by tree branches, with a kid’s joy. Mark followed her, freeing himself from the dream, remembering himself.

He was thirty-eight. Chloe had left him six years ago, not long after Brendan died. He loved Allison Daniel now.

Mark couldn’t help his dreams, but his years of lonely grieving had taught him how to pull his mind back from its gray chasms and thickets, into the world where his body moved, where his heart beat and his lungs breathed in cold air; where a woman he loved frolicked ahead of him in the snow. This was his life, now. His new life.

He wasn’t so naive as to think anyone could simply choose to be happy—that was bullshit of the highest order, and he’d thought so even before his son had, in an instant, fallen down the stairs and out of the world—but one could choose paths that allowed for happiness. One could choose to accept any happiness one found. How many times had he and Allison, herself divorced, talked about this? Neither of them had planned for the other. Planning was impossible. Their lives, now, were wild improvisation.

Allison lifted a hand and smacked a low branch; snow sifted down. Watching her, he felt aching gratitude that, on a morning like this one, he was not alone.

Allison Daniel, he said.

She turned. Her cheeks and lips were a violent red; her black hair was speckled with snowflakes. Mark Fife? she said.

He reeled her in for a kiss. Her lips cold. The barest warm touch of her tongue.

What’s that for? she asked.

For weeks he’d been thinking of proposing to her. He could have asked, then; the words were close to the surface. Marry me. Please.

But he didn’t. That’s for Allison Daniel, he said.

You speak in riddles, she said. She thumped his chest with her palms. Come on. Let’s get coffee.

Just like that, his happiness clouded. Why hadn’t he asked? He had been sure, for some time, that Allie wanted him to. He followed her to the Cup O’Joe feeling as he had in his dream—silenced, as though a magician’s spell had sealed his lips.

Just before the strange woman stared at him through the window, Mark had been steeling himself, again, to ask. As they’d drunk their coffees he’d found his humor again; he had just been trying to convince Allison to call in sick to work, to stay home with him—Mark designed websites for local businesses, working out of his office at the townhouse, and his schedule was his own. Finally Allie had smiled and asked, What’s it worth to me?

She knew, he thought. Ask.

His hesitation registered; Allie’s smile faltered. And when, minutes later, she left for the restroom, he was sure—for a long, free-falling moment—that she had finally given up on him. That none of his thoughts were hidden from her. That she was really calling her sister from the alley, was right now telling Darlene, He’ll never ask. I’m wasting my time. Mark had to fight back an overpowering urge to weep.

But then the stranger had appeared. A cold finger had touched his neck. The unknown woman had stared at him—into him. Whatever she’d found there had caused her to run.

Allison returned now from the restroom, the soles of her snow boots squeaking; she picked up her coat from her chair, then saw his distress. “What’s wrong?”

His first instinct was to lie, to say, Nothing. But he made himself tell her about the woman. “She scared the hell out of me,” he said. “The look on her face—”

“Someone you knew?” Allie said. “Someone—”

“No,” he said.

Allie pulled a white knit cap over her black hair, tugged on her mittens. She was trying, still, to read the look on his face.

“It’s all right,” he said.

They walked the three blocks home, holding hands.

Someone he knew before? That was what Allie had meant. Only a few days earlier, she had been with him at the grocery when, by accident, they had run into the mother of one of Brendan’s old babysitters in the checkout line. The woman had been too slow to realize Allison was with Mark, that they were buying supplies for two. To remind herself that he and Chloe had split. When she finally had, she’d given both of them a quick, sour look of appraisal. A look that seemed to ask, How could a man like him—a man who had lost so much—dare to be happy again?

Allie had seen it, too. In the car she told him, It’s the judgment that gets me. Like anyone has that right.

She wasn’t judging, Mark told her, though he knew better. When the woman in the checkout line had last seen Mark, he had been sobbing at his son’s funeral. And now here he was: trim from two years of working out, wearing an expensive sport jacket and shiny shoes and horn-rimmed glasses, standing at the side of a woman not only obviously younger than poor Chloe, but untouched by grief.

Mark tried to bury thoughts like the one he’d had, then: that Allie didn’t know what judgment was.

The snow on the streets was bright; the rising sun’s light caught hold of every flake. Mark took Allie’s mittened hand; he steadied her, his fingertips touching the small of her back, as she climbed the steps to their townhouse door. He concentrated on these things: touching her, smiling. Again, he brought himself back.

What had happened this morning did not matter. He would ask Allison to marry him. She would say yes. Allie had trusted him enough to love him, and he owed her all of himself. He promised himself, then, that he would ask the right way—he would buy a ring, drop to one knee, say something to her profound and true. He would find the ring this afternoon while Allie was at work. She deserved the full ritual, the best gesture, not some half-assed declaration over morning coffee.

It wasn’t until Mark was pulling the door shut behind him that he noticed the extra footprints leading from the sidewalk to the door. His and Allie’s had come and gone from the left. But another pair of prints—the size of Allie’s, or even smaller—approached their steps from the right, in and back out.

He glanced across the street, right to left. Then he closed the door. Before turning to Allison, he locked it.