“Whoever you are, you’re not this woman.”

“I will explain, Mr. Truitt. I’m not here to make a fool of you.”

“No. You won’t. Whatever else, you’re a liar.”

He turned, and she followed him across the deserted platform to a carriage tied up at the side. The nervous horses stamped and blew great jets of steam from their nostrils while Ralph Truitt put her suitcase in the back and strapped it on with thick leather straps. Without a word, he handed her into her seat.

He vanished in the hurling snow, reappeared and climbed into his seat. He looked at her, full in the face for the first time. “Maybe you thought I was a fool. You were wrong.”

He snapped the reins, and the horses trotted smartly into the white void. They rode in silence. The lights from the windows of the houses glowed softly, as though at a great distance. She couldn’t tell how near or far anything was from the carriage, in the snow. She couldn’t tell how many stores or houses there were. She never saw the turnings until they made them. He knew. The horses knew. She was a stranger here.

The snow silenced the wagon wheels. There was no conversation. She was floating in a soundless void in the middle of nowhere.

“Are there many people?”

“Where?”

“In town.”

“Two thousand. About. More or less every year. Depending.”

“On what?”

“On whether more die than are born.”

They said nothing else. They floated through the snow, the glow of houses in the distance, each one a family, each a series of entwined lives, while they sat entirely separate and alone.

Ralph had nothing to say. He had expected things, and now she was here, whoever she was, and suddenly everything was different. In every house they passed, there were lives that were wholly known to him. In these houses, the people knew one another; they knew him as well. He had held their babies, been to their weddings, been shocked by their sudden flights into madness and rage. He was and he wasn’t a part of their lives. He was there and he had done what was required of him, what was expected.