Right now Vale needs food and a bed to sleep in. She needs to get uphill to Hazel’s old farmhouse, that place where Bonnie grew up. That house—cold white rooms, white pine painted clean again and again—where Vale’s ancestors have lived for two hundred years. Joyless in old photographs, their mouths thin lines. “How many years can you go without joy before the whole shit show crumbles?” Bonnie saying years ago, pinching Vale’s side, laughing.

SHE CATCHES A RIDE WITH AN ELDERLY MAN IN A RED pickup truck.

“You walking? Those roads are destroyed. No way in or out. I can only get halfway.”

Vale nods. “Halfway is good.” She looks at her phone. There’s a message from her boss at the bar, Freddie, to whom she told nothing. WHERE YOU AT, SUGAR CAKES?

“Crazy storm,” the man says. “A woman is missing. You hear that? They still haven’t found her.”

from Heart Spring Mountain by Robin MacArthur (Ecco/Harper Collins)