My husband had spent years warning me never to set foot on that farm. So after he passed away and the lawyer handed me the key, saying that from now on the place belonged to me, I was ready to sell it right away and put everything behind me. But before making my final decision, I still wanted to see it once for myself. When the door opened, I finally understood why, all those years, he had never wanted me to set foot there.

Jenna looked out over the pasture where Midnight moved like a dark comma against the fading grass.

“He did know he was running out of it,” she said.

“Yes.”

We sat with that for a while.

The truth was, in retrospect, Joshua had been changing in small ways that now looked obvious. He had started booking trips instead of merely discussing them. He had stopped talking about retirement as a category and started talking about particular mornings, a porch somewhere, coffee somewhere, horses perhaps, though he never said that part directly. He took more photographs of us in the kitchen. Of Jenna asleep in the passenger seat on a drive home from Duluth. Of me reading in bed with the lamp on and my glasses sliding down my nose. I had thought it was middle-aged sentiment. It had been inventory.

The first snow fell two days later.