Snow was falling. She looked out the window at the pristine expanse of white. Last year it had come down a gray-black color; she'd never been sure why. She'd closed the curtains and hadn't looked out at the yard all winter. She hoped the good snow was an omen. She sipped her coffee.

She didn't have a real reason for staying here. At first, of course, it had been because of Momma, who obviously couldn't have gone anywhere else. Then, after Momma died, it was mostly inertia. It wasn't a bad location; far enough from the worst places that trouble mostly came in easily-repelled ones or twos instead of packs, and it was on one of the regular routes, so traders passed by pretty often. She'd invite them in and offer them a meal or a decent bed in exchange for some of what they were carrying.

One of them had gotten a little nasty last week, though, when she explained she wasn't part of the offer. She'd had to put an ice pick through his eye. When she'd gone through his load, she'd found he had managed somehow to get five pounds of coffee. She hadn't had coffee in two years. She'd already decided, to hell with it, she wasn't going to ration the coffee. What were the holidays for?

The main reason she stayed, though, she had to admit, was that he knew where she was. She told herself that, no matter what else happened, he could always find his way back to this house, the one fixed point.

Momma wouldn't have understood. But Momma didn't understand any of it. They'd played it like a game, still telling her about his imaginary experiences at college. (He'd told her privately that he'd actually attempted to go back to school his second year. The first thing he'd seen when he got to campus was the body of the university president impaled on the finial above the front gate. After that, he didn't try again.) The one time they'd tried to explain to Momma that everything had changed, she'd gone to her room and hadn't come out for an entire day. When she did, the rules had been clear; none of that conversation had happened; nothing outside the house was real.

She looked out the window again, sipped coffee, and wished Momma had been right about that.

Two years. Two years without coffee. Two years without him. He'd come back the year after Momma had died, and that had gone exactly as she had expected it to go, but last year, the year after that, he hadn't shown up. She'd frightened him; she was sure of it. And now she worried he was never going to come back again and she was going to decay in this house and eventually just become a ghost, endlessly watching at the windows.

She caught something moving, barely visible, past the trees. The light was starting to go and dusk, she'd learned, was a good time for attacks for some reason. She set down her coffee cup and started to go get the rifle, then turned around and looked again.

No. It was him! It was actually him. He was limping, and she could tell how tired he was from the way he was holding the shotgun, like he was going to drop it at any moment. She opened the door and ran out to help him in.

He was still wearing his scarf from two years ago. It was stained everywhere, and one end of it was unraveling because something had taken a bite out of it, but he was wearing it. One of his feet was thickly wrapped in cloth and she couldn't tell if it was bandages or just because he was missing that shoe. He had a sort of frozen-over expression, but when he saw her, his eyes focused again, and he smiled.

Later, when he'd gotten warm and they both had hot coffee and were sitting next to one another and everything was right, he looked at her and said, abashed, "I'm sorry I didn't bring you anything."

"It's okay," she said, putting her arm around him. "You're my present this year."