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paper out anywhere close to on time.
    I went through the piece. There wasn’t much left from the kid’s original copy, and it didn’t take long to redo those parts and add some background on the ice palace. I enlarged the photos to fill the rest of the gap, proofread, and clicked Save. The press room foreman was watching through the door, and I gave a thumbs-up. Within minutes the presses were rolling.
    I stayed a few hours, helping where I could—I can stuff inserts in papers as well as the next person, but it’s hot, dirty work. I tried to call home to let Jessamyn know what was happening, but no one answered. After the papers were loaded for distribution, I helped pull the front pages from the discarded ones headed for recycling. George worked alongside me, grimly.
    He set a few copies aside and let me take one. “Lock it away,” he said. He didn’t need to tell me.
    “What are you going to do with them?” I asked.
    “Burn them. I’ve got a barrel behind my house.”
    I helped him carry them out and put them in the trunk of his car.
    As I left, I saw the kid arriving. Probably Sheena had tracked him down. George was easygoing for the most part. You could make mistakes in stories, especially when you were new. You could turn a story in late and you could get away with showing up hungover to work a few times. But this George wouldn’t let slide.
    I’d never known him to fire anyone, but I had a feeling it was about to happen.

CHAPTER 10
    The parking lot was icy, so I stepped carefully. Once I’d fallen flat here and cracked an elbow that still ached whenever a storm was coming in.
    I’m not particularly tuned in to the sound of cars and trucks, although of course dogs can tell when their owner’s car is approaching. But something about the vehicle driving past caught my attention—the sound of the engine, a bounce of springs, or something more subtle. I turned in time to see a truck go past.
    It was Tobin’s truck, or its twin.
    I stood there a moment, staring after it, my breath making billows of steam in the cold air. For one crazy, time-shifting moment, part of me thought the shadowy figure behind the wheel was Tobin.
    But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t Tobin’s truck. No one would be merrily driving it through town, where locals could identify it at a glance. It was just one that resembled his—not even, I thought, quite the same color.
    I’ve done this with people, ones no longer living: my grandfather, a soldier friend killed in Afghanistan. You see someone in a store or out working in the yard and you do a double take, because for an instant it
is
that person, with their height, their appearance,their mannerisms. Then when you look again, you see the resemblance is only slight.
    I started my car and flipped on the seat heater, one of the greatest inventions in the history of the automobile. I tried calling the house again, but the line was busy. I’d never spent the extra to get voice mail on the house phone—it’s a pain with a group of ever-changing roommates, and most people had cell phones. Jessamyn didn’t, and Tobin hadn’t either. I’d figured he didn’t want people to be able to find him.
    I pulled out onto Broadway and made the turn on Route 86 toward home.
    Something really ugly had just happened—for the newspaper and for anyone who had cared about Tobin. Something I’d played a role in. I suppose I could have e-mailed the reporter, letting him know how much I’d changed his piece, but one, it never occurred to me, and two, it would have seemed patronizing. This was how I’d learned to write on a newspaper, without any hand-holding or babysitting. You turned in your work; you paid attention to what was done to it. You did it better the next time.
    But part of me had reveled in fixing that article, in slashing out the kid’s bad writing, showing him how it was done. And I hadn’t given a thought to how he would react when he saw what had been done to the article. This is one