Chapter 1 — Three Weeks Early

I came home three weeks early to surprise my wife and meet my newborn son.

What I found instead is the reason I will spend the rest of my life making certain that the people I love are never, under any circumstances, left in the cold.

Wendy was on the living-room floor when I opened the door.

She was wrapped in a thin blanket, holding our baby against her chest, and she was too weak to get up, and there was frost on the inside of the windows.

For one full second, standing in my own doorway with my suitcase in my hand, I forgot how to breathe.

“Luca?” she whispered.

She said my name like she was not certain I was real.

She looked nothing like the woman I had kissed goodbye six weeks earlier, before I flew to Singapore to close the biggest contract of my career.

She was pale, and drawn, and she was shaking so hard that our son was shaking with her, and she was very unwell in a way that I did not need any medical training to recognize as an emergency.

I will not describe the state I found her in beyond that, because she is a private person and it was the worst moment of her life, and the details belong to her.

It is enough to say that when I crossed that cold room and knelt down beside my wife and my baby, I understood that both of them were in danger, and that I had arrived, by pure luck, just in time.

I dropped the suitcase where I stood.

Chapter 2 — Where’s the Heat

“Where’s the heat?” I asked.

Wendy’s eyes filled.

“Turned off.”

“The groceries?”