By seven o’clock, the windows had disappeared behind sheets of white. By eight, the road beyond her gate was gone. By nine, the world outside her porch light looked less like land and sky and more like one solid, furious thing trying to bury everything in sight.
Claire stood at her kitchen sink, one hand around a mug of black coffee gone lukewarm, and stared into the storm.
Her farmhouse sat ten miles outside Redstone, Wyoming, on forty rough acres of winter pasture and stubborn ground that had belonged to her late husband’s family for three generations. The place wasn’t large, and it sure wasn’t wealthy, but it was hers now—hers to feed, mend, and defend. Since Ben died two winters earlier under an overturned hay truck on black ice, Claire had learned to do all three without asking anyone for help.
She was thirty-four, tall, rawboned, and stronger than most men in Redstone liked to admit. She wore old jeans, wool socks, and one of Ben’s flannel shirts over a thermal top. Her chestnut hair was braided down her back. There was no makeup on her face, no softness in the way she held herself, and no light left in her expression that hadn’t been carved out by grief and hard weather.
The radio on the counter crackled through static.
“—all county roads west of Redstone now considered impassable. Residents are urged to shelter in place. Repeat, do not travel—”
Claire reached over and turned the volume down.
