There are places in the world where winter doesn’t simply arrive; it settles in like an old debt, cold and patient, waiting for everyone who passes through to pay it in silence.
That was the kind of night Caleb Mercer was driving through.
The highway was a pale ribbon vanishing into drifting snowfields, the sky a dull sheet of gray that erased the horizon so completely that sometimes Caleb felt as if he were driving through the inside of a blank page. His pickup truck rattled with every bump in the road, the dashboard buzzing faintly like an insect trapped somewhere behind the plastic panel, while the heater coughed out thin bursts of lukewarm air that barely reached his frozen fingers.
Caleb was twenty-one years old, though the kind of tired sitting behind his eyes belonged to someone twice that age.
He had been on his own since he turned eighteen, which was the polite way the system described the moment when the foster care program shook his hand and quietly showed him the door. For three years he had lived in a narrow one-room apartment above a laundromat in a Montana town called Elk River, a place that liked to advertise its postcard charm to tourists but seemed mostly indifferent to people like him.
His days started before sunrise at the timber mill where he stacked freshly cut boards until his shoulders burned, and they usually ended at a late shift pumping gas at a roadside station where truckers stopped to fill their tanks and complain about the weather. Between rent, food, and keeping his ancient pickup barely running, Caleb rarely had more than a few dollars left at the end of the week.
He had seventy-two dollars in his bank account.
He knew the exact number because he checked it every night, the way some people check the weather forecast, hoping it might magically improve.
