Tuesday, 7:15 a.m.

At 7:15 Tuesday morning I left Kanab heading south, with the sun on my left and a broken promise on the passenger seat.

I hadn't slept more than two hours. Fully dressed, shoes on. When I walked out, the motel office was empty. Nobody saw me leave, or everybody did.

Fredonia, its silos, its gas station switching on its pumps, and the substation, which I drove past with my eyes on the road. Past the town, at the far end of the gray plain, the Kaibab blocked the horizon, long and black with forest, streaked with white.

The road climbed. The junipers came, then the piñons, and halfway up the tall ponderosa pines, straight, with orange bark that smells like vanilla in the sun, something I remembered without ever having known. Snow showed up between the trunks, packed down, dirty, stuck with needles. The thermometer on the dash dropped to thirty-four. I didn't have a coat. I'd forgotten that up there, in April, it's still winter.