2

Chapter 2

Milo

I was halfway to my car when Trent came out after me.

"Milo! Hey!" He jogged down the porch steps in the rain without a jacket and grabbed my left hand before I could open the door. "Wait. Give me that."

"Give you what?"

"The ring." He turned my hand over and looked at it. "That's Grandma's ring. Owen asked Mom about it on the phone last night. He said he wanted it, something to remember her by. Mom said you'd hand it over today."

I stared at him.

Owen was four years old when he went missing. My grandmother gave me this ring when I was fifteen, on the porch of her house in Millbrook, a month before she died. She told me it was mine and nobody else's. Owen had never met her as anything but a baby. He had never seen this ring in his life.

So how did he know to ask for it?

I didn't have an answer. I only knew that a few hours ago, in another life, Owen had twisted this ring off my frozen finger and smiled while he did it.

I pulled my hand away.

"No," I said.

"Come on, Milo, it's just a ring. He's been through a lot."

"It's mine. Grandma gave it to me. Nobody's getting it." I opened the car door. "Not Owen, not Mom, not you."

"You're seriously going to be like this today?"

I got in, shut the door, and drove away with him standing in the driveway in the rain.

I made it to the end of Larkin Street before my hands started shaking. I pulled into the parking lot of a Walgreens and sat there with the engine running and the wipers going, because I couldn't see the road anymore.

I could still feel it.

The freeze came on November tenth. The first night, the temperature dropped forty degrees in six hours, and by morning, every pipe in the city had burst. The power went out on the third day and never came back. By the second week, the grocery stores were empty and people were breaking into houses for canned food. By the first month, the cold was killing people faster than anyone could bury them. You couldn't dig. The ground was frozen solid. They stacked the bodies in the parking garage on Fifth Street because there was nowhere else to put them.

I had walked past that garage every week for two years.

I remembered the sound the snow made at minus fifty, a dry squeak under your boots. I remembered my fingers turning white, then gray. I remembered trading my good winter boots for a can of soup and two batteries, and walking home with plastic bags taped over my socks. I remembered a woman on Mercer Street who sold her coat for a bag of rice and was found the next morning still holding the bag. I remembered men with guns at the Kroger, shooting anyone who came close.

And I remembered that every single thing I found out there, every can and every battery and every blanket, I carried home to my family. And they ate it, and then they threw me out to die.

My phone buzzed on the passenger seat. Mom.

I let it ring out. It rang again right away. Dad. Then Trent. Then Mom again.

I answered the fifth call.

"Where do you think you're going?" My father didn't even say hello. "Your mother is upstairs crying her eyes out. On the day her son comes home."

"I'm her son too."

"Don't get smart with me. You turn that car around and you go get your brother."

"No."

He breathed hard into the phone. "You ungrateful little..."

I hung up. Mom called a second later.

"Milo, baby, please." She was crying, but I could hear how fast she was talking, and that meant she was angry. "Whatever this is, we can talk about it tonight. Just go to the station. Owen's going to step off that bus and you won't be there, and what is he going to think? That you still don't want him? After what you did?"

"What did I do, Mom?"

"You know what you did."

"Say it."

She went quiet.

"I was seven," I said. "You left a seven-year-old in charge of a four-year-old at the county fair so you could stand in line for funnel cake. Trent was twelve, and he was supposed to be with us. You never once blamed him."

"How dare you bring that up today."

"You bring it up every day."

I hung up on her too.

Trent called next. Then Aunt Carol in Ohio, who hadn't spoken to me since my high school graduation. Then my cousin Becca, who still owed me three thousand dollars for a nursing course she quit after two weeks. I sat in that parking lot and went down my contact list one name at a time and blocked every single one.

Then I called the Hollis Community Bank.

Since I was fourteen, every paycheck I earned went into that account. Tutoring, the pharmacy, the summer at the Ridgeway lab, my scholarship stipend from Westbrook University, the twelve-thousand-dollar research bonus I got in September. My father's name was on it because when I was fourteen, my mother said I was too young to manage money. Mom had a card. Dad had a card. Trent had a card. I didn't. If I needed anything, even shoes, I had to ask.

"I'd like to freeze every card on my account," I told the woman on the phone. "All of them. And I need to come in about removing the other names."

She asked me some security questions. I answered all of them. "Done, Mr. Bennett. All four cards are frozen as of now."

Four cards. I had never had one.

In my last life, I spent these nine days buying Owen a coat and cleaning out my room for him. This time, I had nine days and a space with no walls, and I knew exactly what the cold would take from anyone who wasn't ready.

I had a separate checking account from my lab job that my family didn't know about. Four thousand two hundred dollars. It wasn't enough for what I needed, but it was enough to start.

There was a place out on Route 9 I used to drive past every day on my way to campus. Gallagher Outfitters. Big metal warehouse, gravel lot, a hand-painted sign with a mountain on it. I'd never gone in.

The bell over the door rang when I walked in. The inside smelled of rubber and motor oil. Shelves went up to the ceiling, stacked with sleeping bags, tents, propane tanks, and boots in plastic wrap.

"Be right there."

A man came out from the back carrying a propane tank on one shoulder, and he set it down on the floor without even breathing hard.

He was tall, a good head taller than me, broad through the chest and shoulders, with the kind of build you get from work and not from a gym. Early thirties. Dark hair cut short, a day of stubble along a hard jaw, and a thin white scar running through his left eyebrow. His eyes were gray, very light against his tan skin, and tired. He wore a faded gray thermal with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows, and there was an old Army tattoo on his right forearm, half covered by a burn scar. The name tag pinned to his chest said RHETT in black marker.

He wiped his hands on a rag and looked at me, and then he kept looking a second longer than strangers usually do.

"Help you?"

"I need cold-weather gear," I said. "The best you have."

"How cold?"

"Minus sixty."

His eyebrows went up. "Minus sixty. You headed to Antarctica?"

"Something like that."

"Uh-huh." He leaned on the counter. "You're soaking wet, you know that?"

I looked down. I'd been standing in the rain with Trent and hadn't even noticed. My hoodie was stuck to me.

Rhett reached under the counter, pulled out a clean towel with the store logo on it, and tossed it to me. "Here. Before you drip on my floor."

"Thanks."

"Sleeping bags rated for that are in the back. I've got three. Boots, maybe ten pairs in your size. Parkas I'd have to order." He watched me rub the towel over my hair. "How many sleeping bags do you want?"

"All of them. And twenty more, if you can get them."

He laughed. Then he saw my face, and he stopped laughing. "That's a lot of money, kid."

"I'm twenty-three."

"That's a lot of money, twenty-three."

He wrote up the order on a carbon pad in neat block letters. Three sleeping bags in stock, twenty on order, boots, thermal liners, two propane heaters, a water filter kit. He did the math on a calculator older than me. When I handed him my card, he held onto it a second and read my name off the front.

"Milo Bennett," he said, slowly, testing it.

"That's me."

"You okay, Milo Bennett? You look like somebody who just got really bad news."

"I'm fine."

"You're not, but okay." He handed the card back. His fingers were warm against my cold ones, and he noticed. He frowned at my hand. "Jesus, you're freezing. Go home and change before you get sick."

"I don't really have a home right now."

I didn't know why I said it. He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he took the towel back from me, folded it, and put it on the counter.

"The stuff on order," he said. "My supplier says it'll be here on the eighth. But if you need it faster than that, you'll have to give me a better reason than 'something like that.'"

"Why does it matter to you?"

He came around the counter. Up close, he smelled of cedar and engine grease, and he had to look down to meet my eyes.

"Because you're the third person this week who walked in here asking for gear rated for minus sixty," he said. "And every one of you wanted it before the tenth of November."

My heart stopped.

"I never said the tenth," I said.

"No," Rhett said. "You didn't."