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Still on, it says. Merry Christmas, Rémy.

I look at the photo until the flight attendant tells me to put my phone in airplane mode. Then I turn my face to the window so the guy next to me won't see.

Chapter Seventeen

OWEN

I spend Christmas at the lake.

It's the first time I've been up here since the spring, since before Laurel said she was done. Saul called on the twentieth to tell me the papers were signed. The house is mine. I drove up on the twenty-fourth, three and a half hours north in the dark with the snow coming sideways across the highway, and I let myself in with a key I haven't used in eight months.

The house smells closed up. Cold and dusty and a little like pine. Laurel's things are gone. She took the good lamps and the rug from the living room and the painting of the sailboat over the fireplace, and she left everything else exactly where it was, like a museum of a marriage.

I turn up the heat. I make a fire. I sit on the couch with a beer and don't turn on any lights, and I watch the snow come down over the lake until it's too dark to see it.

The dock's still there. I can see the shape of it in the morning, a long white line running out over the ice. My dad and I built it the summer I was seventeen, the summer before I got drafted. He was a quiet man. He didn't say much that whole summer. We'd work all day in the sun, pounding nails, and at the end of the day he'd put his hand on my shoulder, once, and say, Good work, and that was the most anybody in my family ever said about anything.

He died four years ago. I never told him anything real. I don't know what I would have told him. I didn't know myself.

My mother calls at noon on Christmas Day.

"Merry Christmas, honey. Where are you? It sounds echoey."

"At the lake."

"By yourself?"

"By myself."

"Oh, Owen." She sighs, the long sigh that's been worrying about me since I was six. "You should have come to Mesa. Your sister made a ham. It's seventy-two degrees."

"I know, Mom. I needed to be up here."

"Is it sad? Being there?"

I look out at the dock. The sun's out today, and the snow on the ice is so bright it hurts.

"No," I say, and I'm surprised to find it's true. "It's not sad."

She's quiet for a second.

"You sound different," she says.

"Different how?"

"I don't know. Lighter. You haven't sounded like this in years. Not since—" She stops herself. "Not in a long time."

"I'm okay, Mom."

"Are you seeing someone?"

I close my eyes. I stand at the window with the phone against my ear, and I think about how easy it would be. Yes. I'm seeing someone. He's twenty, he's French-Canadian, he talks in his sleep about bread.

"It's complicated," I say.

"Complicated's fine. Your father and I were complicated." I can hear her smiling. "Whoever she is, I hope she's kind to you."

I don't correct her.