Chapter 142 - Chapter 142: The Year's End

December came in white and kept it. The snow that had started the last night of November did not stop so much as settle — the lake taking it in along the frozen margins, the shore filling in, the house sitting white-roofed above the white water the way it had sat in the winter before. The ice crept out from the reeds in sheets, dark first and then pale, holding the sky's grey light and giving none back, and Aaron walked its edge in the afternoons the way he had walked it the winter before, reading the water's work the way you read a thing you have come to know.