She remembered him describing where he lived, and she believed she was near it.

She believed she could walk there in a manageable amount of time and call for help from his house.

She was wrong about the distance.

And that miscalculation was almost the last mistake she ever made.

The Walk

The darkness was total outside the car’s headlights.

The snow reflected enough ambient light to make moving possible, but the landscape was featureless — the flat white of snow-covered fields stretching in every direction, broken only by tree lines and fence posts that offered no reliable navigational reference in the dark.

Jean started walking in the direction she believed Wally’s farmhouse to be.