Sixty centimeters of snow fell on Hallvik in a single night, and in the morning the roof of the rescue station wore it like a bad hat.

The station had been built in 1911 by men who believed in snow. They had given it a steep pitch, a wide overhang, a long iron rail along the eaves to catch the slides, and a standing order, written into the original charter in somebody's furious copperplate, that the roof must be cleared by the whole team after every fall exceeding thirty centimeters. Every winter this order was obeyed. Every winter somebody complained about it. This year the complaining was done mostly by Per, who had developed a cough and a theory that the founders had been sadists.

"A man could die up there," he said, standing in the yard with his shovel on his shoulder and his beard full of ice.

"A man could," said Maren. "A man could also die of a collapsed roof. Pick your death, Per."

"Neither. I'd like a third option."

"There isn't one. Put on your harness."

She was not going up. It was her job, this morning, to stay on the ground, where she could watch the roofline and the eaves and the ropes, and clear the drifts away from the doors so that nobody was buried when the snow came down. It was a job she liked. It had an excellent view. The roof crew went up in three pairs, Halvor and Dagny at the west end, Per with a grumbling Liv at the center, and, because the roster was the roster and because Ingrid had put it there with a perfectly straight face, Elias and Tobi on the east gable, above the porch.

Maren stood below with her shovel and her radio, and found that her eyes went to the east gable more often than anywhere else.

She told herself it was because of Tobi. It was Tobi's first roof. He was twenty-three, he was enthusiastic, and enthusiasm on a steep roof was a medical condition. That was the reason. She repeated it several times, in the manner of someone reciting a protocol, while above her Elias worked his way along the ridge with a long rake, pulling the snow down in great soft slabs that fell past the eaves and burst on the ground in white explosions.

He moved well on the roof. He always had. There was no wasted motion in him, no hurry, nothing of the swagger Per brought to it or the anxious care of Tobi. He set his boots, leaned into the rake, drew, and stepped back, and the snow came away from the slates in a long, obedient sheet. His harness line ran back to the chimney in a neat curve. Every few minutes he said something to Tobi, who answered, and she caught the shape of it from the ground, the quiet *here, like this*, the boy's delighted *oh*.

She leaned on her shovel. It was a peaceful morning. The sun had come out, a flat white coin in a white sky, and the yard was loud with the thuds of falling snow and the voices of her friends. The whole valley sparkled. She realized, with a faint shock, that she was happy, in some small, uncomplicated, entirely unauthorized way, and that she had not noticed the feeling arrive.

Then, above the porch, something cracked.

It was not loud. It was a dry, flat sound, like a branch in a hard frost, and it came from the very edge of the east eave. She looked up. The overhang above the porch had been collecting snow all night, and under the snow there was ice, a thick shelf of it, welded to the roof by weeks of thaw and freeze, and as she watched, a hairline fracture ran along the whole length of it, from one end of the gable to the other.

Tobi was standing at the edge. He was a meter from the eave, leaning out over it with his rake, reaching for a cornice he could not quite touch.

"Tobi!" she shouted.

It was the wrong word. It was the word of someone who did not have the right one in her mouth, and he turned his head, startled, and put his weight back on the foot that was nearest the edge.

The whole shelf went.

She saw it fall as a single piece, a slab of ice and snow the size of a table, sliding away from the roof with a long tearing groan and carrying with it a strip of the old iron flashing that had been holding it there. For a moment the whole mass hung in the air above the porch like a held breath. She saw Tobi's arms fly up. She saw his boots leave the slates.

And she saw Elias.

He did not shout. He did not hesitate. He crossed the roof in two strides, unclipped nothing, took Tobi around the chest with one arm and went over backward, taking the boy down beneath him with the whole length of his own body, his back to the sky. The slab hit the edge of the roof where they had been standing. It sheared off a corner of the gable. A long curl of flashing, jagged and rust-brown, whipped upward off the eave, rang against the chimney, and came down across Elias's arm and hip with a sound she would remember, for no reason she could explain, for the rest of her life.

The safety line twanged. The harness held. And then it was quiet, and the snow was still falling in slow soft streams past the porch, and the roof of the Hallvik rescue station was silent.

Maren dropped her shovel.

She did not remember crossing the yard. She was at the foot of the porch with her radio in her hand and her pulse in her teeth, and she was calling something up to the roof, to both of them, a stream of syllables with no meaning, and from somewhere above, Tobi's voice came back, high and wavering.

"I'm okay! I'm okay, I'm, oh God. Elias. Elias, you pushed me. You just, you—"

"I'm all right," said another voice, low and perfectly level. "Tobi. Breathe. Clip in. Slowly."

They came down the ladder one at a time. Tobi first, white as milk and shaking, with a bruise already rising along his jaw, and Maren caught him by the shoulders and ran her hands over his skull and spine and ribs in four fast, professional seconds. Nothing broken. Nothing even cut. A bump on the chin. A pulse like a hummingbird.

"Sit," she said, and put him on the bottom step.

Elias came down last. He took the rungs slowly and without any particular grace, and when he reached the ground he stood a moment with his back to her, looking at the porch where the broken slab lay in a heap of glittering wreckage. He had pulled his jacket tight around him. His left arm hung close against his body. He was holding it, she saw, in a peculiar, deliberate way, the way a man carries a tray he does not want to spill.

"Rask," said Maren.

He turned. He had put a calm face over whatever lay underneath, a perfect mask of courtesy, and he looked at her with a faint, apologetic smile. "Everyone's all right. The porch roof will need a repair."

"Take off your jacket."

"It's nothing."

"I did not ask what it was."

"I'll clean it later. There's work to—"

She walked up to him and took hold of the sleeve of his jacket. It was wet. It was wet in a way that snow did not make a sleeve wet, a dark, slow, spreading wet that had soaked through the wool at the elbow and was running in a thin red thread over the back of his glove and dripping, one bead at a time, into the snow at his boots.

They both looked at it.

"Medical room," said Maren. Her voice was perfectly calm. "Now. Tobi, go and sit in the kitchen and drink something sweet. Halvor, get him a blanket. Per, take over the yard."

"Maren," said Elias, gently.

"That was an order."

He looked at her. There was something in his face she could not read, an expression halfway between amusement and tenderness. She took her hand off his sleeve as though it had burned her.

"Yes, Paramedic," he said, and went.

The medical room was at the back of the station, a small white room that smelled of antiseptic and old linoleum. It held an examination couch, a steel cabinet, a sink with a leaking tap, and a window that looked out on the woodpile. Maren had spent more hours in it than in her own kitchen. She knew where every drawer stuck.

"Sit," she said. "Jacket off."

He sat on the edge of the couch. He got the jacket off with his right hand, with a hiss of breath he could not quite suppress, and she saw the sleeve of his sweater underneath, slashed from elbow to wrist and black with blood.

"Sweater."

"It's the only one I—"

"I'll buy you another. Sweater."

He peeled it off, and she cut away the last of the cuff with scissors and took a look.

It was a long gash on the outside of the forearm, nine or ten centimeters, ragged along one edge where the rusty flashing had dragged. It was deep, but it was clean. No tendon, no bone. It would need stitches, and it would need a tetanus shot, and it would hurt for a week. Her breath went out of her in a long, slow rush she had not known she was holding.

"What else?" she said.

"That's all."

"Elias."

It was out before she could stop it, and neither of them moved. She had not said his name in three years. She said it now in the voice she used for patients who were lying, and it lay between them on the white floor like something dropped.

He held her gaze. He looked, for a moment, almost frightened. Then he sighed, lowered his eyes, and drew up the hem of his undershirt on the left side.

The second cut ran along the crest of his hipbone, a shallow, angry line eight centimeters long, bleeding sluggishly into the waistband of his trousers. It was not deep. It would not need stitches. It needed to be cleaned, and she needed to look at it, and she was going to have to touch him.

She turned away to the cabinet.

"Arm first," she said, to the shelves. She pulled out the suture kit, the lidocaine, the antiseptic, the gauze. Her hands were quite steady. She was proud of them. "This will sting."

"I know."

"I'm going to numb it. Then I'll irrigate, and then I'll close. You'll feel pressure but not pain. If you feel pain, tell me."

"I'll tell you."

He would not, and they both knew it.

She sat on the stool beside the couch and took his arm in her lap. His skin was cold and rough with fine dark hair. A long pale scar crossed the inside of his wrist that she did not remember, and she traced it with her eyes and did not ask. She drew up the anesthetic. She slid the needle in along the margin of the wound, once, twice, a series of small precise punctures, and she felt his whole arm go rigid and then, with an effort that was almost visible, loosen.

"Breathe out," she said.

He breathed out. She irrigated the wound with saline, and the water ran pink over the tray, and she picked out a rust-brown fleck of metal with forceps and dropped it into the dish with a faint, small, final ring.

Then she started to sew.

It was quiet work. She had done it ten thousand times, and still there was something in it that quieted her, the small bright curve of the needle, the thread drawing through, the slow gathering of two torn edges into one. She tied each knot with three throws and snipped the tail. She could hear the tap dripping. She could hear the faint, even, careful breathing of the man on the couch, and the rattle of the radiator, and, very far away, the muffled voices of the team clearing the yard.

"You didn't have to do that," she said. She had not meant to speak. "On the roof. You could have grabbed his harness line. You could have let him swing."

"He was on the eave. The line wouldn't have held the slab."

"You could have waited a second."

"There wasn't a second."

She tied off the sixth stitch. Her eyes were on the wound. "You went over backward. You took it with your arm. You could have broken your neck."

"I know where the roof ends, Maren," said Elias, quite softly.

She stopped. The needle hung in the air between his skin and her fingers.

It was the second time. The first had been in the dispatch room, on the night of the storm, with her hands full of his hands, and he had said it then like a man picking up a very hot cup. He said it now in exactly the same way, carefully, as though the word might still burn. She waited for him to say it again, and he did not.

She finished the stitches in silence. Nine. She counted them, as she always did, and cleaned the line with iodine, and laid a strip of gauze across it and wound a bandage up from the wrist to the elbow. Then she took a long breath and said, "Now the hip."

He lay back. She cleaned the wound with a fresh swab. It was a surface cut, as she had thought, and it took less than a minute. But she had to hold the edge of his shirt back with one hand while she worked, and the hand was flat against the hard, warm plane of his stomach, and each time he breathed, the muscle moved under her palm.

She did not look at his face. She looked at the cut. She looked at the swab. She looked, for lack of anywhere else, at his shoulder, which had come bare when he pulled up the undershirt, and she saw a scar there that she did not know.

It lay high on the left shoulder, a round, puckered ring, white and slightly sunken, about the size of a coin. It was old. It had healed well. It was not the scar of any rescue she had been present for, and it stopped her breath altogether.

"What's that?"

"What?"

"On your shoulder."

He turned his head. He seemed to see it for the first time, as though it belonged to someone else. For a long moment he said nothing, and when he spoke, the lightness in his voice was so false that it was almost a courtesy.

"Long story."

"I've got the whole winter."

He smiled. It was small and crooked and tired, and it did not reach his eyes, and in it she saw, to her dismay, that he was grateful. He was grateful that she had asked. He was grateful that she had said she had time. He lay on her examination couch with a bandaged arm and a naked scar and looked up at the ceiling and said, "Maybe I'll tell you. Not today."

"Fine."

"Thank you."

"I didn't do anything."

"You asked."

She taped the dressing down over his hip with a strip of white tape and smoothed the edges flat. Her thumb lingered on his skin a second longer than the tape required. She took her hand away.

Somewhere along the way, she thought, she had stopped being able to hate him in the old way. It had been so simple once. It had been a clean, hard, cold thing, a stone in her chest that she could hold. And now she had a man on her couch who did not ask for anything, who did not complain, who did not argue or plead or defend himself, who had flung himself off a roof to save a boy he had known for a week and then tried to walk away without telling her he was bleeding. There was nothing in it to hold. It kept sliding through her fingers.

She stripped off her gloves and dropped them in the bin.

"You'll need a tetanus shot," she said. "I'll give it now. And you're off the roof for a week. Don't argue."

"I won't."

"You'll keep the dressing dry. You'll come back on Friday and I'll check it. If it goes red or hot, you tell me that day."

"Yes."

"If you don't tell me, I will find out, and I will be unpleasant."

"I believe you." He sat up carefully, drew the torn undershirt back down, and reached for the ruined jumper with his good hand. He looked at her. In the flat white light of the room his eyes were very clear. "Thank you, Paramedic."

*Paramedic.* She felt it land. She felt, absurdly, the small cold drop of it, and she stood still with the needle in her hand and understood, with a horror that came on slow and complete, that she had been waiting.

She had been waiting for him to say her name again.

She turned to the cabinet and put the needle in the sharps bin and said, in a voice she recognized as her own, "You're welcome."

When he had gone, and the corridor had gone quiet, and she had given him the injection and watched him walk away down the hall with his jacket over his arm and his shoulders straight, Maren went back to the room and began to clean up. She wiped the couch. She bagged the swabs. She scrubbed the instruments in the sink and set them in the sterilizer, and when there was nothing left to do, she stood at the basin with the tap running and held her hands under the water.

It was cold. It was very cold. She lathered the soap and rubbed her palms together, the backs, the wrists, the spaces between her fingers, the way she had been taught to do it, for thirty seconds. Then she did it again.

The water ran pink at first, from the last of the blood, and then clear. She watched it spiral down the drain. Her skin was red with scrubbing. And still her hands remembered it, a faint stubborn warmth across the palm of her left hand, a place where a man's stomach had risen and fallen under her fingers, as if she had pressed them against a stove and the heat had stayed.

She rinsed them for a long time. Much longer than she needed to.