The road out of Cedar Creek's downtown - if downtown could be said to be a meaningful term for a block and a half of buildings - turned into gravel within two hundred yards and then into something that was technically a road by virtue of being slightly more worn down than the land on either side of it. The afternoon had tipped toward evening and the air, which had seemed merely brisk when she'd arrived, had developed opinions. It was cold the way Montana cold apparently worked: not the damp, grimy cold of Chicago winters but a clean, insistent cold that came in off the mountains and went straight through the seams of her coat. Her coat was a good coat. It was a very excellent city coat, charcoal wool, fitted, appropriate for board meetings and client lunches. It was not, it turned out, a Montana coat.

Her heels - low block heels, she'd thought she was being practical - were doing something creative in the gravel.

She had, in her defense, not expected to be doing this. She had expected to be in Louisville, eating her mother's chicken potpie and pretending not to notice that the person at the adjacent dinner plate had been invited for reasons beyond the quality of his company. She had packed accordingly: two work-from-anywhere outfits, pajamas, one dress her mother had specifically requested she bring, and the kind of shoes she wore when she was trying to look casually professional without obviously trying. None of these categories overlapped meaningfully with hiking equipment.

The mountains were closer now. That was the thing about the Montana landscape she was going to have to come to terms with: the scale of it was not static. The mountains kept appearing to be at a certain distance and then, when she looked again, they were clearly larger, more specific, more real - she could see the individual texture of the treeline, the way the slopes darkened as elevation increased, the faint remnants of snow in the high notches between peaks. She had grown up looking at horizons that were largely flat, had spent her adult life in a city where the horizon was replaced by a skyline, and there was something almost vertiginous about the way the Montana mountains just sat there, enormous and indifferent, not doing anything in particular except existing at a scale that made her professional anxieties feel briefly small.

She found this useful. She filed it.

"You need a lift, honey?" The first offer came from an older man in a green pickup, slowing beside her with the unhurried consideration of someone who had nowhere particular to be. He had a white beard and a face like a topographical map and he was looking at her roller suitcase with an expression that might have been sympathy or might have been the kind of amusement you try to hide out of basic courtesy. "That's a long walk to anywhere useful."

"I'm fine, thank you." Joanna kept moving, which required some effort from the gravel. "I'm just getting oriented."

"Yes ma'am," he said, without apparent sarcasm, and drove on.

She walked another quarter mile. The cold settled in at her collar. Her phone stayed dead. She thought, with the clinical detachment she deployed when things were not going as planned, about what she had actually accomplished by getting on a train in the wrong direction. She had, technically, achieved the goal of not being in her apartment staring at Derek's email and the three boxes of his things she'd packed up and was going to have to arrange to have returned. She had not achieved the goal of being at her mother's kitchen table. She had achieved, instead, an accidental meditation retreat in the form of a four-mile walk on a dirt road in Montana, which was either the universe's sense of humor or a reasonable escalation of her need to be somewhere no one from her regular life could reach.