The Great Alone: A Novel

They sat there, not talking; each breath Leni took felt difficult, as if her lungs had a mind of their own and might stop working.

. In literature, death was many things—a message, catharsis, retribution. There were deaths that came from a beating heart that stopped and deaths of another kind, a choice made, like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should.

In real life, she saw, it wasn’t like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.

A thing can be true and not the truth, now shush.

“Weather’s unpredictable up here. Some years June is spring, July is summer, August is autumn, and everything else is winter.”

You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

Once, a lifetime ago, she had worried about girls, only a few years older than her, who had gone missing. The stories had given her nightmares at thirteen. Now she knew there were a hundred ways to be lost and even more ways to be found.

Mama had wanted Leni to come home, but home was not just a cabin in a deep woods that overlooked a placid cove. Home was a state of mind, the peace that came from being who you were and living an honest life. There was no going halfway home. She couldn’t build a new life on the creaky foundation of a lie. Not again. Not for home.

Life seemed to reward who you knew more than what you could do.

That evening, after dinner, Leni sat on her twin bed, reading. The Stand by Stephen King. In the past week, she’d read three books by him and discovered a new passion. Goodbye science fiction and fantasy, hello horror.

She figured it was a reflection of her inner life. She’d rather have nightmares about Randall Flagg or Carrie or Jack Torrance than about her own past.

“Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe, a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”