Tonight, the snow falls fast and builds inches and inches upon the feet that have already accumulated. I think this season will never end, and I can't help myself: I turn on the local news to purge the house of quiet. The meteorologist, with his soft blond hair, rosy cheeks, and chocolate brown suit looks a bit like my husband did ten years ago--too young for his age, happy, content. He drones on in a voice that doesn't match his face about a cold front and a warm front and the snowfall record that has been broken yet again. I hope for his sake that he isn't like Steven at all. I hope that the cameras and the Doppler radar are his fountain of youth. I hope he doesn't wake up one day, the way Steven did, and suddenly have the forty eight years of his life show up on his face and in his eyes and in the way he holds his coffee cup.

I walk through the downstairs of our house, and I open the drapes, all of them, despite the cold that seems to radiate from the windowpanes. Steven will be angry with me when he gets home. He will discuss, as he calls it, how the heat bill will skyrocket and how I endanger myself, as anyone could drive by and see that I'm home alone. I'm a menace to myself, he'll say. I will sit with my ankles crossed on the uncomfortable couch in our living room, the one we keep just for show. I'll watch and then listen as he walks the perimeters of the rooms, jerking all the heavy curtains closed. When he finishes, he'll sit beside me. He'll smell faintly like gin and tonics, and his arms will wrap around me like they have for the past twenty-one years. His body will feel heavy against mine, but glad for the comfort of it, I'll press into him. I'll undo his suit jacket, and stroke my fingers along the buttons of his shirt. This is the part of our routine that I have always liked--the part where we forgive each other. I missed you too, he might say, or maybe that he loves me, and I will say it back to him and mean it.

I pause when I reach the windows in his office, then stop and sit at his desk. Maybe I should feel guilty, that these are his private things, but once I'm through the second drawer, all I can think of is finding something, anything that will explain why he isn't home yet, something that has nothing to do with the storm. It is trouble with the IRS, I think, or he has produced some previously unknown child who has come looking for money. There could be documents hidden, concrete evidence, and when I find the key, the tiny brass one that opens the locked drawer of the desk, I realize what I'm really looking for.

It will be a love letter, or perhaps a stack of them twined together neatly. They will be old, but not too old--relevant in ways that I can't yet imagine. I think, what kind of wife does this, and then answer: me. I finger the key, and the smoothness of the metal is comforting. They do not make keys like this anymore, and I think of those Victorian social comedies, the games those women would play, and the men too. This is a key to his real life, maybe, the one he lives when not listening to my stories of misbehaving children let loose in my bookstore or helping me with the weekly accounting or playing the role of a husband who thinks what I do is worthwhile.

Before I have opened the locked drawer, before I go any further, I look at the usually blank legal pad that has rested on his desk since I've known him. And I realize I've written the letter for him. I read the sentences, composed in my own hand: Dearest one, I am leaving my wife. We will be together soon. Love always, Steven.

Our dogs, both Irish Setters, decide that I have neglected them for too long, and bound into his office. They have been sleeping in the nest of old comforters we'd set up for them in our bedroom, their lanky bodies curled together in the blankets. I'm not sure what has woken them up, but they are bored or they need to go outside or they're missing the games Steven plays with them.

They must go out, and so I leave the desk, tearing the top page off of his legal pad and stuffing it into my pocket. The dogs follow me as I walk through our living room, past the dining room and kitchen, down the hallway. I trace my hands along their backs as they run past me out the front door, and their fur is soft as satin. They chase each other, plow through the snow banks that have built up in our front yard. They bark and play like they did when they were puppies.

But my eyes wander from the dogs. As I look toward the road, I remember reading about the way that snow and light together can play tricks with the eyes. Tricks, I think, and I repeat it out loud in a soft whisper. This begins to calm me and helps me forget that the snow, as I look in the direction that Steven will be coming from, appears to be a blanket of bright red, flashing and shining and sparkling. It must be a trick, I think, aurora borealis, something supernatural. It cannot be lights from up the road, from that turn that is treacherous, the one written about in our local paper every winter since I can remember. I ignore the cold on my slippered feet and I try to stay angry. I don't know what will happen if I stop practicing what I will say when he finally gets home. The speech keeps getting shorter the more I think about the softness of Steven's hands and the way the night sky has never seemed darker and this awful snow that will not stop falling.