“My sister-in-law shoved me into a $40,000 fireplace while my mother-in-law watched and my husband called me ‘dramatic’—but four hours later, a doctor found a suspicious drug in my bloodstream and asked who had been making my morning coffee for the past six months.”

A year after the Thanksgiving dinner that broke my collarbone, the first heavy snow of December was falling over the Licking County hills, turning Blackwood Farm into a landscape of white, gray, and deep iron-black.

The old Greek Revival house had a new roof of charcoal-colored standing-seam steel that hummed softly under the weight of the wet flakes. The green shutters had been rehung, the porch had been rebuilt with eight-inch square posts of solid white oak, and three cords of seasoned sugar maple were stacked neatly under the eaves.

Inside, the double parlor was warm, smelling of woodsmoke, roasting chicken, and fresh pine needles from the seven-foot spruce tree sitting in the corner by the bookshelves.

There was a fireplace here, too.

It wasn't a forty-thousand-dollar imported French limestone mantel designed to frame a socialite's cheekbones. It was an honest, four-foot-wide hearth built from local river granite in 1874, with a heavy lintel of rough-sawn chestnut that held three brass railroad lanterns that had been converted to low-wattage electric light.

I stood beside the fire, holding a heavy stoneware mug of hot cider in my right hand.

My shoulder had healed clean. There was a thin, silvery scar three inches long above my collarbone where the surgeon had removed the titanium wire in April, and my temple showed a faint, pale line that was completely hidden by the sweep of my dark hair.

My right arm was strong again. I had spent the morning helping Vesper haul fifty-pound sacks of cracked corn out to the horse barn, and my grip was as solid as it had been on the day I hired out as an apprentice switchman twelve years ago.

"Maren!" Pete Kowalski yelled from the kitchen, where he was currently engaged in a violent argument with Vesper over the proper way to make sausage stuffing. "Tell this crazy old woman that you don't put sage in stuffing if you're using pork sausage! It ruins the fat profile!"

"Pete," Vesper’s voice barked back over the rattle of iron skillets. "If you don't shut your mouth about the sage, I’m going to make you eat your turkey on the porch with the barn cats."

Graham Calloway was sitting in the deep leather armchair by the fire, his boots off, his thick wool socks propped on the hearth, reading through the third-quarter operating report for Caldwell-Buckeye Logistics.

"Net operating income is up fourteen percent, Maren," Calloway said without looking up from the page. "The intermodal terminal at Marysville cleared forty thousand lifts this month without a single safety violation. Marcus says the board wants to authorize an employee dividend for the third shift."

"The dividend is already approved, Graham," I said, leaning my back against the chestnut lintel, feeling the deep, steady heat of the stone soak through my woolen sweater into my ribs. "Every track worker and dispatcher gets four weeks of base pay on December 15. We don't run ghost cars anymore."

Calloway smiled, turning the page with a dry rustle. "You had an offer from Norfolk Southern this morning. They want to buy out the northern Ohio trackage rights for twenty-two million."

"Tell them no," I said. "We like the track where it is."

The kitchen door swung open, and Marcus Vance walked in, carrying a large wooden tray loaded with small glasses of dry cider and a platter of Vesper’s molasses cookies.

"The yard called five minutes ago, Maren," Marcus said, setting the tray on the low coffee table between the chairs. "Train 204 just cleared the diamond at Marion. All forty cars of steel are on the iron, the bearings are running cold, and the engineer says the signals are green all the way to Lake Erie."

"Clear signals," I murmured, looking through the tall double-hung windows at the snow falling softly through the dark branches of the sugar maples outside.

"Clear signals ahead," Marcus agreed, handing a glass to Calloway, then to Vesper as she walked in wiping her flour-covered hands on a blue linen towel.

We stood together by that roaring stone fire—a dispatcher from Circleville, an old accountant from Blackwood Farm, a railroad lawyer who had spent his life fighting for the small, and an old brakeman who had worked his way to the top of the division.

Nobody was checking their reflection in the glass. Nobody was worried about whether the light hit their cheekbones. Nobody was looking over their shoulder to see who was taking photographs.

Outside, five miles to the south, I could hear the faint, low horn of a westbound freight train cutting through the cold December air—a long, steady sequence of two longs, a short, and a long, echoing off the hills, rolling through the timber, moving steady and unstoppable through the winter night.