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because he’d failed at everything else—not because he wanted to be here, living alone in the house his parents had deeded to him out of pity, with nothing to show for his time away from the valley but a few books he could fit in a suitcase, his favorite pillow, and skin as impervious to sensation as the neoprene seats of his old Jeep. Olivia was supposed to have been the bright spot in his return to Green Valley—and yet he couldn’t get past the awkwardness of being with her again, as if he was just some half-remembered acquaintance, and not the person that she’d once trusted with her most intimate thoughts and dreams.
    “Look, could we go somewhere, um, shadier to continue this conversation?” he asked.
    “But I told you I’m not watering. You’ve got to believe me. I don’t know what else to say. It’s not my fault that Gloria has it out for me. She—”
    “Olivia—”
    “She decided she doesn’t like the boarders living in the barn, and I swear she’ll do anything just to get under my skin. She doesn’t—”
    “Olivia!”
    She stopped. And in the silence was forced to meet his eye.
    “I don’t want to talk about the garden,” he said.
    “Then … what do you want to talk about?”
    He rubbed the back of his neck but didn’t feel it. “I just wanted to talk with you.”
    She said nothing; but she looked away with a pained expression on her face.
    He’d heard the latest stories about Olivia from the guys at the station: that she was kind and self-sacrificing, that she’d be the first person to send fresh produce to a family in need if she heard of them, that she cared for her screwball father who got screwier by the year, that she could look at a man and make him feel like he was the only man in the world who mattered—but that beneath her outward radiance and kindness she was oddly inaccessible and cold. She lived like a nun, people said. No one could remember the last time she’d been spotted on a date—not that Sam cared if Olivia was seeing every guy in Green Valley. Her love life meant nothing to him—not in any practical sense.
    Losing the sensation of his skin had quashed his interest in women like losing his taste buds might have made him turn away food. He was, in many ways, dead to the world. He’d died eighteen months ago on a mountain in the Adirondacks called Moggy Knob. After his Cessna went cartwheeling along the tops of the thick green pines and landed half crushed against a rocky outcropping, he’d managed to hold on for three and a half days, drifting in and out of sleep, in and out of shock, eating handfuls of snow from pine boughs through a broken window, pinned inside the jagged metal teeth of his crushed plane. In the chattery cold of Moggy Knob nights, when the clear, starry sky gave a man all the room he needed to think, he’d realized that he had no idea what he was meant to do with his life, except to know that what he’d done already wasn’t it.
    Minute by minute, he’d managed to grit his teeth and hold on, hold on, hold on. But the moment his rescuers found him, he could hold on no more. And he’d died. Just like that. He remembered it perfectly: He heard the sound of a helicopter, then voices. He felt strong hands. As his relief at being rescuedswelled, the mental scaffolding that had kept him conscious for more than three days suddenly imploded, and he passed gently away.
    Later, they told him he’d been clinically dead for almost six straight minutes. Six minutes—gone. And when he came to again in a hospital bed, everyone gathered around him and called him a lucky son of a bitch—as if anything about two broken legs and a wrecked face was lucky. We’ve got a saying, one of the orderlies told him. A guy’s not dead unless he’s warm and dead. You, my friend, were definitely not warm. Apparently, the cold temperatures that had nearly killed him had also saved his brain when his heart finally gave out.
    Six minutes you were on the other side,