It kept happening. Every storm, my driveway was plowed by morning. Then groceries started appearing — milk, bread, a bag of apples — on the porch when money was tightest, which was always. My porch light, which had been dead since August, was suddenly working. I never saw him do any of it. He was like weather: just there.

In December I caught him. I came home early from my shift at the clinic and his truck was in my driveway, and he was under my porch with a toolbox, replacing the light fixture like he’d been hired. He straightened up when he saw me, embarrassed, like a boy caught stealing.

“Harlan,” I said. “You don’t have to do that.”

He wiped his hands on a rag. “I know.”

“Then why?”

He looked at the porch light for a long moment. “Ruth used to say a man is measured by what he does when nobody’s watching.” He picked up his toolbox. “Nobody’s watching, Diane.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said thank you, and he nodded and drove home, and I stood under my working porch light and cried for reasons I couldn’t name.

January brought the cold snap — nine below, the kind of cold that finds every crack in an old house. At two in the morning the furnace quit. Just quit. The house went silent in that terrible way, and then the cold started coming through the walls. I called the emergency line and got a recording. I called Gary — Emma’s father, the man who was supposed to co-own this crisis — and got voicemail. I sat on the stairs in three blankets and did the math on frozen pipes.