A Stranger in the Snow

The woman appeared at the end of the drive like something the storm had invented — a figure so encrusted with snow that she might have been a statue come loose from a garden, stumbling through the white chaos with the mechanical persistence of someone operating on instinct alone. Anders saw her from the kitchen window and for a moment did not move, because the sight was so improbable that his brain categorized it as weather, as illusion, as one of the tricks that Jutland winters play on solitary men.

He brought her inside and sat her by the wood stove, where she thawed with a slowness that seemed almost geological. She was young — thirty, perhaps — with dark hair plastered to her skull and eyes the colour of the North Sea in November, grey-green and depthless. She could not tell him her name. She could not tell him where she had come from or how she had arrived at his farm, which stood three kilometers from the nearest road and eleven from the nearest town. She looked at her own hands as though they belonged to someone else, turning them over with a curiosity that Anders found more unsettling than any explanation could have been.

The blizzard sealed them in with the finality of a court ruling. Anders called the police, but the line went dead mid-sentence, and when he tried his mobile, the screen displayed the single bar of signal that in rural Denmark is less a connectionthan a taunt. He made coffee, heated soup, found dry clothes that had belonged to his wife before she left — a detail he did not share with his guest. The woman ate with the careful attention of someone relearning a skill, and when she finished, she looked at Anders and said, with perfect calm, "I think someone is looking for me. I think it would be better if they did not find me."