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fifteen degrees today,” she called to Ben.
    Even after twenty years, the sight of her husband still made her smile. For a moment the dusk turned warm, and Sandy started to walk forward.
    Ben slammed the door of the Jeep, looking up at the sky. “I just booked the first skiers of the season backcountry. There’s going to be at least two feet by tomorrow.”
    Ben ran an outfit called Off Road Adventures, which catered to weekend warriors coming up to the Adirondacks for a taste of adventure along with a well-contained dash of risk. Ben occasionally scoffed at his clients’ approach to sport—
when you don’t have any real danger in your life, why not scale a cliff to add some
—but it was a bit hypocritical, since his veins too pumped with forced adrenaline. Ben had pursued adventure sports for decades, artificially inflating the level of peril in his life until he was expert enough to help the novices.
    Sandy used to accompany him on these journeys: free-climbing, biking, and skiing off-trail. But once Ivy came along any such activity was difficult to schedule, and Sandy couldn’t justify the hazards. Ben craved challenge; Sandy had accepted that when she married him. But Ivy needed at least one parent who stayed on the ground.
    She followed Ben’s gaze to a sky smeared with pasty clouds. “Looks like it.”
    Ben closed the distance between them, mounting the stone steps of the porch. He reached out and their cold fingers tangled in greeting. “How are things at the ranch?”
    “Had to do a little rustling today, cowboy,” Sandy said.
    “Bad?” Ben said with a look that could’ve been a grimace or a grin.
    Sandy shrugged. “Ivy’s in one of her moods.” A pinch of tears surprised her. Sandy couldn’t remember the last time she had cried, and knowing not to get rattled by a teenager’s mood swings wasn’t exactly something for which you needed a degree in psychology. She looked away, hoping Ben would assume that her eyes were just stinging from the cold. “Come on,” she said, adding a deliberate shiver. “Let’s go in.”
    Ben was facing their driveway again.
    “Honey?” Sandy said.
    “Did the Macmillans come up for the weekend?”
    “What?” Sandy asked. She glanced toward what Ben called the no-longer-so-great camp. “Hmmm, I don’t know. No one’s been by.”
    “Never mind.” Ben ringed her waist with one arm. “Thought I saw something moving around in there.”
    “Probably just the wind,” Sandy said, and shivered again, this time for real.
    —
    In the kitchen, Sandy turned the stove light on, bringing the water back to bubbling. She held her hands near the flame for a moment, warming them. Then she went to raise the heat in the rest of the house.
    “Give me a sec and I’ll start a fire,” Ben said.
    He reached into the fridge, snapping the tab on a can of Red Bull. Ben could drink three of them, or down a whole pot of coffee, and still sleep like a baby. Sandy figured it went along with his choice of career. Her husband could tolerate more stimulation than most people. In fact, he seemed to require it.
    He went out onto the side porch, and after a moment Sandy heard the
thunk
of the ax as it sliced into the wood stump Ben used for cutting. He liked to split logs himself, refusing to have a cord of firewood delivered at the start of the season. Ben didn’t come from around here, but in many ways he seemed to. Self-reliance was the anthem of the Adirondack old-timers.
    Ben staggered back into the kitchen underneath an armload of wood, then crouched by the stove. “Think Ivy would mind fetching me a little kindling?”
    Sandy let out a snort and turned to leave the room. “I’ll go.”
    Ben called, “Hey, San?”
    She rummaged around in the closet they used for outerwear; no more impromptu trips outside coatless for the next five or six months. “What?” she asked, walking back to Ben while pulling on a pair of gloves.
    “Tell Ivy to do it, huh?”
    “Honey…” Sandy was