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.

She decided to consider it the latter. It was more useful.

The second offer came ten minutes later from a woman in a massive ranch truck, white, with what appeared to be two border collies in the back. They watched Joanna with the polite, assessing gaze of working dogs who were reserving judgment. The woman had a no-nonsense braid of dark hair going gray at the temples and the easy authority of someone who spent her days making decisions and having them stick.

"Elk Ridge is four miles out," the woman said. "Straight shot, but it gets dark fast out here and that's mountain dark, not city dark." She said city dark like a category of insufficient dark, which, Joanna thought, was probably fair. Chicago after midnight was still orange and loud. She had a feeling that mountain dark was something else entirely.

"I'm good," Joanna said. "Truly."

The woman gave her the particular look of someone who has decided not to argue with a fool. "Suit yourself." She drove away, and the two border collies watched Joanna through the rear window with an expression that she chose to interpret as respect rather than pity.

The road curved. The sky deepened from pewter-gold to something more serious, rose and violet at the edges, the mountains cutting a hard dark line against it. Joanna paused and looked at it in spite of herself.

It was - she would not say this out loud, she would not give Montana the satisfaction - extraordinary. Not pretty in the way she was used to seeing landscape that people called pretty, not the manicured pretty of parks designed to be scenic, but extraordinary the way something is extraordinary when it doesn't know it's being observed. The mountains existed the way they existed regardless of whether she was here to see them. The sky didn't care. The cold didn't care. There was something almost restful in that indifference, some small relief available in being witnessed by nothing. In Chicago she was always being witnessed: by clients, by colleagues, by her team, by the ambient performance of professional competence that was so constant she sometimes forgot she was doing it. Here the mountains were so large and so indifferent that the performance had nowhere to go. It just dissipated into the cold air.

She stood there for what was probably an embarrassing amount of time, just looking.

Then she started walking again.