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“Shane! Hey!” He said it like finding Shane in a trailhead lot was the best news he’d had all week, which, with Jake, it might have been. “Rick said you were busy.”

“I was,” Shane said.

Jake waited for the rest of it. When it didn’t come, he just grinned and tossed him a hand warmer. “Well, I’m glad. You know this trail better than anybody. Is the top switchback icy this time of year? I wasn’t sure about the shaded part.”

“The shade holds ice till March,” Shane said. “Stay to the uphill edge.”

“See? That’s why you come.” Jake jogged off to meet the next car.

Three teachers he knew by sight climbed out of it, and then Lauren’s car pulled in with Allison in the passenger seat, and Shane forgot about the ice entirely.

She got out in a knit hat pulled down over her ears and a coat that was going to be too warm in twenty minutes, and she saw him, and she stopped with one hand still on the car door.

Then she walked over.

“You came,” she said.

“I came.”

She studied him. She had started doing that lately, looking at him the way she looked at things she intended to draw, as though the first look were only the beginning. “Is there something up there that needs fixing?”

It was a fair question. He had spent four months giving her reasons to ask it.

“No,” he said.

She waited.

“I wanted to come.”

He watched it land. Her face didn’t do anything large, but something at the corner of her mouth gave way, and she looked down at the frost for a second, as if she needed somewhere to put her eyes.

“Okay,” she said. “Good.”

Behind her, Lauren took one look at the two of them and developed an urgent interest in Jake’s opinions about ice cleats. She walked off beside him asking follow-up questions. Jake, delighted to be asked, answered every one.

* * *

The trail went up through the lodgepole in long switchbacks, the ground hard with frost and loud under their boots, the air so cold and clean it hurt a little to breathe. Jake led. Shane walked at the back, the way Roy had taught him, where you could see everyone and nobody had to wonder whether they’d been left behind.

Allison drifted back to him within the first quarter mile.

She stopped for everything. A stump furred white with frost. The light coming through the bare larches. A woodpecker working somewhere out of sight, which she stood and listened to with her head tilted until it quit. The rest of the group pulled steadily ahead, and she didn’t seem to mind, and he found he didn’t either. He had walked this trail a hundred times. He had never once walked it at the speed of somebody looking at everything.

At the overlook the trees opened onto a shelf of rock, and the whole valley was suddenly below them. The town. The steeple. Main Street no bigger than a pencil line. And the lake filling the bottom of it all, dark and still, with a thin white rim of ice along the shore.

The group spread out along the rock with granola bars. Jake went down the line pouring hot cider into everyone’s cups. Allison sat on a boulder, pulled off one glove with her teeth, and took a sketchbook out of her coat.

Shane sat on the rock beside her. Not close. Close enough.

She drew fast, looking up and down, her pencil moving before she’d finished looking. After a while she said, without raising her eyes, “Payne’s gray.”

“What is?”

“The lake. Today. It’s Payne’s gray.”

He looked at the lake. “It’s galvanized.”

That got her to look up. “Galvanized is not a color.”