That was what the isolated ridge had been for.

My husband had brought his nine-months-pregnant wife to a remote cliff in a blizzard, not because their marriage had gone wrong in some ordinary way, but because he had done the arithmetic, and decided that I was worth more to him dead than alive.

It was not an argument that went too far.

It was not a terrible accident.

It was a plan, calculated over months, and I had been living inside it, trusting the man executing it, without knowing.

“My fingers are freezing,” I heard Gretchen say.