The runners caught a ridge of ice and the sled bucked sideways, sending Hannah tumbling off the back with a yelp that split the cold air. Ellie heard it, that high bright sound bouncing off the shopfronts, easy and careless, the way only a seventeen year old could sound in the middle of a January night. Then her own sled hit the same ridge and she was airborne, the ground tilting, the paper lanterns overhead swinging in her vision like small warm moons.
She landed in a drift at the corner of Main and Elm, the snow packing cold against the back of her neck and already melting, water trickling down her collarbone. The sky above the rooftops was that particular winter black that only happens in mountain towns, hard and clean, the stars so close they looked sticky. Somewhere behind her Hannah was laughing so hard she had stopped making sound, just rocking in the snow with her mittens pressed over her mouth.
Ellie sat up. Her gloves were somewhere in the drift. Her hat had survived, thank God, because her mother would have killed her if she came home with frozen ears again. The sled lay three feet away, one runner buried, the other catching the light from the nearest lantern and throwing it back in a long orange stripe across the snow.
Main Street in winter smelled like woodsmoke and pine and, faintly, the yeast from the brewery on the far side of town. Every storefront along the four block stretch of the festival had paper lanterns strung across the road, reds and ambers and one stubborn strand of green that the hardware store put up every year and nobody ever took down. The snow under the lanterns was trampled to a brownish hardpack, crisscrossed with sled tracks and boot prints, and beyond the trampled zone the untouched drifts rose in soft white shoulders against the curbs.
Ellie retrieved her glove from under a bench and brushed it off. Her fingers were already numb. Her cheeks burned in the way that meant the cold had gotten past her scarf and was working on her face, and she could taste the copper tang of blood where she had bitten the inside of her lip on impact.
Hannah appeared beside her, snow in her hair, cheeks so red they looked painted. She was holding a bottle by the neck, one of the cheap splits her parents kept for New Year's, the foil already peeled back and the cork missing.
"You okay?" Hannah asked, still giggling.
"Define okay."
"Still got all your teeth."
Ellie opened her mouth and wiggled her jaw for show. Hannah laughed again, that loose bell sound, and held out the bottle. Ellie took it. The champagne was flat and too sweet and it burned a thin line down her throat and pooled warm in her stomach, and she drank longer than she meant to before handing it back.
"Where'd you get that?"
"Your mom's fridge. Behind the orange juice."
"Hannah."
"She has, like, six of them. She won't miss one."
Ellie closed her eyes for a second and listened to the festival. Someone was playing fiddle badly on the bandstand at the end of the street. A kid was crying somewhere near the cider stand. The big bonfire in the town square popped and hissed, sending a column of sparks up into the black, and a cheer went up from the cluster of teenagers gathered around it, because of course there was a cluster of teenagers gathered around it, because this was Stillwater and this was the Ice Festival and everyone who was anyone was either at the fire or watching the fire or walking in circles around the fire pretending they were not at the fire.
She opened her eyes. Hannah was watching her with that look, the one that meant she was about to say something either very brave or very stupid.
"What," Ellie said.
"Nothing."
"You have a face."
"A good face."
"A face that means you're going to say something."
Hannah took a sip from the bottle, wiped her mouth with the back of her mitten, and looked up the street toward the square. The lanterns swung overhead and her face kept shifting between warm and shadow.
"Do you ever think about leaving?"
Ellie was quiet for a long moment. A gust came down the street and shook the lantern strands, and the shadows jumped and rearranged themselves across the snow.
"Sometimes," she said.
"Sometimes?"
"I think about it."
Hannah turned to look at her. Hannah's eyes were brown and very clear and she did not look away when she was waiting for an answer, which was one of the things Ellie both loved and found exhausting about her.
"I'm applying to Hampshire," Hannah said.
Ellie felt something shift inside her chest. Not a surprise exactly. Hannah had been talking about Hampshire since sophomore year, had the brochure taped above her desk, had driven up to Amherst with her mother for the campus tour last spring. But hearing her say it out loud, here, in the snow, made it real in a way that the brochure had not.
"When," Ellie said.
"December. Early decision."
"And if you get in?"
Hannah's mouth twitched into that half smile, the one that meant she already knew what she was going to say but wanted to say it anyway.
"Then I go."
"Without me."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know."
They were quiet. The fiddle had stopped and someone had started up a guitar, and the singing that followed was off key and earnest and made the cold feel farther away. Ellie took the bottle back from Hannah and drank, and the champagne was so cheap it was almost like drinking sugar water with a kick, and she hated that she liked it.
"What about you," Hannah said, and her voice had gone careful, the way it always did when she was approaching something she thought might hurt.
"I don't know."
"You're a good writer, Ellie."
"I'm a decent writer."
"You're the best writer in our class. You're the best writer in the school. Mrs. Calloway told my mom you should submit to the Atlantic competition."
"Mrs. Calloway tells every student that."
"She doesn't."
Ellie shrugged and pulled her scarf up over her chin. Her breath came out in a slow plume and the wind took it sideways. A group of boys from the hockey team came jogging down the sidewalk, their breath trailing behind them like a banner, and one of them, Tommy Gaffney, shouted something that was supposed to be funny about sledding and did not look where he was going and slipped and went down hard on his back, and the rest of them laughed so hard they had to stop and lean against the hardware store window.
Hannah watched them go. "Boys are stupid," she said, with great satisfaction.
"Agreed."
"Boys are so stupid."
"Agreed."
Hannah turned to her again. "You could come with me. To Hampshire. Or anywhere. We could get a place. I could work at the library and you could write and we'd be poor and happy and never come back."
Ellie wanted to say yes. She wanted to say yes so badly her throat ached with it. But she thought about her father's cough that had not gone away since September, and her mother working double shifts at the diner, and Ruth's older sister Clara already gone to Portland with a baby on the way and no intention of coming back, and her younger brother Sam who was only twelve and still believed, with the terrible confidence of a child, that his oldest sister would always be there.
"I can't," Ellie said.
Hannah's face fell, just for a second, before she rearranged it into something braver.
"Not yet," Ellie added. "I can't yet."
Hannah looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and held out the bottle.
"Okay. Not yet. So let's not think about it tonight."
They drank. The fire crackled. The lanterns swung. Ellie could feel the cold working its way up through the soles of her boots and into her toes, and the champagne had stopped warming her and started making her feel slightly untethered from her own body, which was, she supposed, the point.
They walked up the street toward the square, leaving their sleds where they had fallen. The snow crunched under their boots. The festival thinned out the closer they got to the square, the families with small children peeling off toward the warming tent, the couples drifting toward the bonfire, and by the time they reached the bandstand it was mostly just teenagers and a few determined old men in parkas standing with their hands in their pockets, watching the fire like it was doing something worth seeing.
Ellie and Hannah drifted to the edge of the square and stood under a tree that had paper lanterns hung from its bare branches, and the light came through the snow on the needles and made the whole tree look like it was glowing from inside.
"I should tell you something," Hannah said.
Ellie looked at her.
Hannah's mouth worked for a second. She was chewing on the inside of her cheek, which she always did when she was nervous.
"My dad found something. In the town records. Something about the land up by the old mill site. The paper this whole time has been saying the mill is on town land, but there's this other deed, this old one from, like, the eighteen hundreds, and he says it doesn't match."
Ellie blinked. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know. He doesn't either. He just said he thought I should know, because, you know, the town is voting on the development next month and he thought if something was wrong with the deed then maybe the vote should wait."
"Hannah."
"I know."
"Who else knows?"
"Just me and him, I think. He told me last night. He made me promise not to say anything."
Ellie looked at her. Hannah was watching the fire, but her eyes were not really on the fire. She was watching something inside her own head, turning it over.
"You just told me," Ellie said.
"I know."
"Hannah."
"I know. I just." She stopped. She pulled her hat down over her ears, even though her ears were already bright red. "I just wanted one person to know. In case something happens. In case it gets lost again."
Ellie felt the cold differently now. Not just in her toes and her fingers and her cheeks, but in some deeper place, some place she did not have a name for yet, somewhere behind her ribs.
"Nothing's going to happen," she said.
"You don't know that."
"I know."
"No you don't. Nobody knows. That's the whole point."
Ellie opened her mouth to argue, and then she heard the shout, or maybe it was not a shout, maybe it was a laugh that turned into a shout, and then there was the sound of something heavy hitting the snow, and then the bonfire sent up a column of sparks, twice as high as a man, and a girl was screaming, and someone was saying "move, move, move" in a voice that sounded like it belonged to an adult and was coming from a teenager.
Ellie grabbed Hannah's wrist and pulled her toward the square.
The crowd had pulled back from the fire. A boy was sitting in the snow about ten feet from the base of the pyre, his jacket on fire, and a man Ellie did not recognize was beating at the flames with his own coat, and the boy was screaming, high and thin and terrible, and then someone else, an older woman, came running with a blanket from the warming tent, and the flames went out and the boy kept screaming.
Ellie felt her stomach turn. She could smell the hair burning, a thick sweet smell that would stay with her for years afterward, in random moments, on subway platforms, in grocery stores, until the day she forgot where it came from.
"Don't look," Hannah said, but she was looking, and Ellie was looking, and they were both seventeen and could not look away.
The boy was someone from the hockey team, she realized. One of the boys who had run past them earlier. She could not remember his name. He was shaking hard, his hands pressed to his face, and the man who had beaten out the flames was kneeling beside him saying something low and calm, and then the EMTs were there, because of course the EMTs were there, because this was a town of two thousand people and a festival and the EMTs were always standing at the edge of the square waiting for exactly this.
The crowd began to disperse. The fiddle started up again, hesitantly, as if the musician was not sure whether the music was still allowed. Ellie realized her hand was still on Hannah's wrist and she was holding on too hard, and she let go, and Hannah did not say anything about the red marks left by her fingers.
They walked back toward the sleds in silence. The champagne bottle was still standing in the snow where Hannah had left it, half buried in a drift, and Hannah picked it up and finished what was left and threw the empty bottle into the trash can at the corner.
At the sleds, Hannah turned to her.
"Don't tell anyone about my dad's thing," she said.
"I won't."
"Promise."
"I promise."
Hannah nodded. She pulled her hat down again. The lanterns swung overhead, casting moving shadows across her face, and for a moment she looked older than seventeen, older than Ellie had ever seen her look, and then the moment passed and she was just Hannah again, grinning, fierce, full of something that Ellie would not, for many years, learn to call hope.
"Come on," Hannah said. "One more run."
"It's freezing."
"One more run. And then I'll drive you home before your mom calls the state police."
"My mother would not call the state police."
"She would call your sister Clara, and Clara would call the state police."
Ellie laughed, because this was true, and the laugh felt strange in her chest, too big for the moment, and she picked up her sled and followed Hannah to the top of the slight rise at the head of Main Street, and they pushed off together, side by side, and the cold came up and met them and the lanterns blurred overhead and the snow rushed past on either side and Hannah was laughing again, that high careless sound, and Ellie felt, for one long second, that she was flying.
came to rest against a snowbank at the bottom of Main Street, and Ellie lay there for a moment with her cheek against the cold wood, breathing hard, watching her breath bloom and disappear. Hannah was still beside her, sprawled out, one arm flung wide, the other hand pressed flat against her chest.
Then Hannah sat up.
Her face had changed. The grin was gone. Her eyes, still bright, had gone serious in a way Ellie had not seen on a twenty-three-year-old face before, not even on Hannah's face, and a small cold finger traced down Ellie's spine that had nothing to do with the weather.
"I need to tell you something," Hannah said.
"Okay."
Hannah pulled off her hat. Her hair was dark with sweat at the temples. She looked at Ellie with that searching, too-direct look she had, the one that had always made Ellie feel both flattered and exposed.
"I found something," Hannah said. "At the lumber mill. In the back offices. The ones they keep locked."
"Go on."
"It's a contract. Or part of one. Pages and pages, in that old typewriter print, and I couldn't take it because Mr. Pesch saw me, but I got a good look, Ellie. I got a good look."
She was speaking fast now, the words tumbling, her breath making small white clouds. Ellie sat up slowly. The street around them was quiet, the way streets in small towns get quiet after dark, but the silence had a listening quality to it, the kind that makes you feel the eaves of the houses leaning in.
"Mr. Pesch," Ellie said.
"Walter Pesch. He's the night foreman. He's been there since before I was born. He sees everything, but he doesn't say anything, not ever, not unless he's paid to." Hannah's mouth twisted. "He saw me, and he didn't say anything either. He just stood there in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and his mouth shut, and then I left, and he didn't follow me, but I know he's going to tell him."
"Tell who?"
Hannah looked at her.
"Vincent Hale," she said.
The name fell into the silence between them and lay there. Ellie knew Vincent Hale the way everyone in this town knew him, as the man who had been everywhere for as long as anyone could remember, who had drafted wills and deeds and town charters, who had a face like a hatchet and a voice like warm syrup, who could charm a bird off a branch and then sell the branch back to you at a profit. He had been Ruth's lawyer when Ellie's father was sick. He had been at the house during the worst of it. He had drawn up some paper for Clara that Ellie had refused to read.
"What kind of contract?" Ellie asked.
"The kind that's supposed to be on file at the town clerk's office," Hannah said. "The kind my dad would have filed before he died. But it's not there, Ellie. I went through every drawer. It's not there. And it's in Pesch's office like it belongs to him, like it's his."
Hannah was gripping her own knees now, knuckles white through her gloves.
"Something about the mill," she said. "Something about who owns the timber rights. Something about dates that don't make sense unless you assume the agreement was written ten years before anyone says it was."
Ellie felt the cold on her face sharpen into something else.
"Hannah."
"I know what you're going to say. I'm twenty-three. I should stay out of it. Let the grown-ups handle it."
"I wasn't going to say that."
"You were thinking it."
"I was thinking," Ellie said carefully, "that if Vincent Hale doesn't want anyone to know about it, then you need to be careful."
"I am being careful."
"Hannah."
"I am being extremely careful. That's why I'm telling you. Because if something happens to me, you'll know. And you'll write it down, because that's what you do. You write things down. You make people remember."
Ellie stared at her friend. The lanterns were still swinging overhead. Somewhere a dog was barking. The snow had begun to fall again, thicker than before, the flakes larger and wetter,
Ellie did not answer right away. She watched the snow come down through the open door, watched it catch the lantern light in slow spirals, watched it begin to dust the shoulders of Hannah's coat. The dog had stopped barking. Somewhere out past the marina, the wind was still throwing itself against the harbor wall, but in here the world had gone small and close, the two of them bent together over a shape neither of them could yet see.
"I used to write things down," Eleanor said. The words came out quieter than she had meant them to. "I wrote things down for the City Sentinel for six years. I wrote things down about other people's misfortunes. I made a decent living at it."
She paused. The cold from the doorway was creeping across the floor now, finding her boots.
"And then I stopped," she said. "Not because I ran out of things to write about. Because I ran out of a reason to believe it mattered. The things I wrote, nobody remembered. They got recycled into other news. They got folded into other people's arguments. The people I wrote about moved on, or they didn't, and either way it had nothing to do with me."
Hannah's mouth opened, and Eleanor raised a hand.
"I'm not finished. You asked me to write things down if something happens to you. You asked me to make people remember. And the answer is yes. Of course the answer is yes. I have been saying yes to you since we were nine years old and you asked me to hide your brother's frog in my lunchbox. The answer has always been yes."
The lantern above the door chose that moment to gutter. The flame leaned sideways, threw a long shadow across Hannah's face, then steadied itself. Hannah was not crying. Her eyes were dry and bright and fixed on Eleanor with the particular intensity of someone who has rehearsed a speech and only just now realized they are about to give it for real.
"But I need you to understand what you are asking me," Eleanor said. "You are asking me to take on Vincent Hale. You are asking me to take on whoever is paying Vincent Hale. You are asking me to walk back into the exact kind of fight I left this town to escape, and you are asking me to do it while my mother is dying two miles up the road and I haven't spoken to her in three years except through Clara, who shouldn't have to be the one carrying messages between her own daughters."
"I know," Hannah said.
"You don't know. You think you do. You are twenty-three, and you have not yet learned that knowing is a thing you do with your body, not your head."
"I know that too," Hannah said, and there was a small, fierce smile at the corner of her mouth. "I have lived in this town my whole life. I know exactly what it does to people who ask questions."
"Then why are you asking them?"
"Because nobody else is."
The words landed in the room and stayed there. Eleanor could feel them against her skin. She thought of her father in the hospital bed, his hand slack in hers, his mouth still trying to form words the ventilator would not let him finish. She thought of the argument with her mother, which had been, in the end, about who got to decide what counted as dignity. She thought of Clara, who had stayed, who had inherited the choosing.
"Mrs. Pesch," Eleanor said slowly. "Walter's wife. You said the contract was in Pesch's office. Does she know?"
"I don't think so. Walter keeps his office at home, in the back room. She doesn't go in there. Nobody does, except by appointment."
"And Pesch himself. Where is he tonight?"
Hannah hesitated. It was the first hesitation Eleanor had seen from her all evening, and it landed like a stone in still water.
"I don't know," Hannah said. "That's the thing. His truck is gone. His wife said he went out earlier, before the storm started. She thought he was going to check on the mill. But when I went by the mill, there was nobody there. The place was locked up tight."
"The storm came in fast," Eleanor said.
"It did."
"And you're worried."
"I'm careful," Hannah said, and the word came out with the same stubborn emphasis she had used before, but Eleanor could hear the hairline fracture running through it now. "I am being extremely careful. But I have been extremely careful for three weeks, Ellie, and I have also been extremely alone in it. My dad is dead. My mother doesn't read my blog. Walter Pesch pretends he doesn't hear me when I see him at the post office. And Vincent Hale smiles at me like I am a child who has wandered into the wrong pew."
Eleanor stood up. The stool rocked back on the uneven floor, and she put a hand against the wall to steady herself. The room tilted slightly, then settled. She walked to the doorway and pulled it half-shut against the snow. The wind protested at the gap, then subsided.
"I want to see the contract," Eleanor said. "Not tonight. Tonight we go home. We go to my mother's, we check on Clara, we make sure the generator is running. But tomorrow, in daylight, I want to sit down with you and I want to read every word of that paper you found. I want to see the dates. I want to see the signatures. I want to see whose seal is on it and whose initials are in the margin."
Hannah nodded.
"And I want you to do something for me in return," Eleanor said. "I want you to stop going to the mill alone. I want you to stop walking up to Walter Pesch's back door at odd hours. Whatever you are doing, you do it with someone else in the room. You do it with me, or you don't do it. Those are the terms."
"That's not how journalism works."
"That is exactly how journalism works when the person doing it is twenty-three and the people she is writing about are accustomed to making problems disappear. You can argue with me about it, and I will listen, and then we will do it my way. Because I am older, and I am tired, and I have already lost one person to this town by not paying attention. I am not going to lose another one by being polite."
Hannah looked at her for a long moment. The snow had thickened outside, and through the half-shut door Eleanor could see it banking up against the harbor wall in soft white drifts. The lantern steadied itself again. Somewhere in the back of the shop, a clock she had forgotten was there began to chime the half hour, a thin mechanical voice that sounded surprised to be working at all.
"All right," Hannah said. "Tomorrow. In daylight. You and me."
"You and me," Eleanor agreed.
"And Ellie."
"What."
Hannah pulled the gloves off her hands and set them on the counter between them. Without the gloves her fingers were red and raw, the knuckles swollen, a paper cut across one thumb that had stopped bleeding but not healed. She flexed them once, twice, as if reminding them they were hers.
"Thank you for coming home," she said.
Eleanor did not trust herself to answer. She picked up the gloves and held them out, and Hannah took them, and they stood there for a moment in the small warm shop with the snow piling up against the windows and the clock still ticking in the back room and the whole town settling itself in for the long night ahead.
Then Eleanor reached for her coat.
"Come on," she said. "Let's go see my mother."
They stepped out into the storm together, the door swinging shut behind them, the bell giving one last thin ring into the dark. The snow came up to their ankles on the sidewalk, and the wind found them at once, and the streetlamps along Main Street burned low and orange through the white. Hannah tucked her arm through Eleanor's without asking, and Eleanor let her, and they turned their faces toward the hill and began to climb.
Behind them, in the empty shop, the lantern over the door finally went out. The counter where Hannah had set down her gloves held the faint impression of two small ovals in the dust, already beginning to fill with snow blown under the sill. The clock ticked on. The storm pressed its weight against the roof. And far up the coast, in a house Eleanor had not entered in three years, a light in a second-floor window flickered once, twice, and held.