I came home unexpectedly for christmas. I found my daughter sleeping on the floor by the door, wearing torn, worn-out clothes. My sister had used her to clean shoes and told the guests, "that's our crazy servant." I didn't scream. I just stepped forward and said six words... the room suddenly fell silent.

The sun came up over the ridge at seven-fifteen, turning the snow from dead blue to the color of apricot skins.

The hospital released Piper at noon, but not to me—she was released to the custody of the county child protective services for forty-eight hours until the administrative order from the magistrate could be processed to vacate Brooke’s temporary guardianship.

I didn't go to the motel in town. I drove the Dodge back up the three-mile hollow, through the fresh tracks the plow had left, until I reached the gate where the cracked stone pillar stood like a broken tooth against the hemlocks.

The state police tape had been taken down, but the yellow fire department ribbons still fluttered from the lilac bushes by the well-house.

The front door of the house was wide open, exactly as I had left it sixteen hours earlier. The house had frozen through. The radiators had begun to split, thin ribbons of gray ice curling from the cast-iron seams like lard from an extruder. In the parlor, the three crystal chandeliers had stopped dripping; the frost had coated the prisms until they looked like clusters of white salt hanging from the water-stained ceiling.

I walked into the kitchen.

On the long linoleum table where my mother had rolled her pie crusts, the caterer’s trays were still laid out in three rows. The crab canapés were frozen hard as gravel, their little parsley hats covered in frost. A five-pound wheel of imported Stilton cheese had cracked down the center where the sub-zero wind from the hallway had hit it, looking like a gray rock split by lightning.

I didn't touch the food. I walked to the pantry, took a twenty-gallon galvanized garbage can from behind the door, and carried it out to the dining room.

I started with the crystal.

I didn't pack it. I didn't wrap it in newspaper. I took the twelve lead-crystal wine goblets Brooke had bought with the timber money from the north pasture, and I dropped them one by one into the bottom of the zinc can.

Clang. Crash. Tinkle.

The sound was clean, sharp, and loud in the frozen house.

Then the plates—the English ironstone with the green ivy border that had belonged to Richard’s mother.

Smash. Crack.

I worked for two hours, until my arms were shaking and the front of my flannel shirt was gray with dust from the shattered porcelain. I cleared the sideboard. I cleared the silver-plated chafing dishes, throwing them out the open front door onto the gravel drive where they landed with heavy, hollow thuds that scared the crows out of the hemlocks.

Around three o’clock, a red pickup truck pulled into the drive.

It was Jesse, the young EMT from the volunteer department. He had his yellow turnout coat on over a gray hooded sweatshirt, and he was carrying a five-gallon plastic bucket of gray hydraulic cement and an iron trowel.

He didn't come inside. He stood on the porch, looking at the pile of broken glass and bent silver in the snow.

"Chief Miller said the magistrate is going to let you have the keys tomorrow morning," Jesse said, leaning against the doorframe. "He said you’re going to need the flue lined before you can fire the woodstove in the kitchen."

"The woodstove runs on the kitchen chimney," I said, coming to the door with an armful of Brooke’s green velvet curtains that I had torn down from the parlor archway. "The kitchen chimney is sound. My father built that one himself in seventy-six."

"I know he did," Jesse said. He set the bucket down on the flagstones. "My grandfather helped him haul the fieldstone from the creek. He said your old man wouldn't use the lime from the quarry; he burnt his own shells from the river because he said the state lime had too much magnesia in it."

He looked into the dark, freezing hallway where the soot was still smeared across the baseboards.

"Where are you going to put the girl?" he asked.

"In the south room," I said. "The one with the two windows that look out on the orchard. The floorboards are oak in there. They don't hold the gas."

"She’s a good kid," Jesse said. He took a pack of tobacco from his pocket, looked at it, and put it back without taking one out. "When we were carrying her down the lane, she told Gidley that his cruiser smelled like old cabbage. She told him he ought to put some cedar shavings under the front seat."

"She has an opinion about everything," I said.

"That’s from her father," Jesse said softly. "He was the same way when we were working the high lines down in Sussex. If the wire wasn't pulled to four hundred pounds of tension, he’d make us drop the whole span and do it over with the come-along."

He picked up his trowel. "I’ll get the cap on the secondary stack before the wind comes round from the west. If the snow gets into that cracked mortar tonight, the whole chimney will come down on your pantry roof."