What the Snow Brings

The house always looks its prettiest in winter.

Even now, with the power out and the storm pressing hard against the windows, our Vermont getaway glows in that soft, amber way only firelight can manage. The stone fireplace breathes heat into the room, flames lifting and falling like they’re tired of fighting the cold. Two mugs sit on the coffee table, both mine: one half-finished hot cocoa and next to it, a glass of red wine that’s been warming between my hands all night.

Outside, the storm has swallowed the world. Snow falls in heavy sheets, erasing the lines between trees, sky, and earth until everything is the same moving white. The wind claws at the eaves, shaking the windowpanes. Drifts have buried the porch steps; the plow won’t reach us until tomorrow afternoon. The house feels wrapped in winter’s tightest grip, sealed shut from the rest of humanity.

On any quiet night like this, I would be writing. But my mind feels scraped clean, a page soaked through and left to dry. So I sit here in my soft, fluffy pajamas, tucked under a blanket, gazing out the back window into the wild dark. The glass fogs with each breath I exhale.

Upstairs, my husband sleeps beside a small battery-operated heater we found in the basement. He’d tried to get me to come to bed earlier, but the warmth of the fire pulled me away. That, and the silence. That, and the fact that sleep no longer comes easily to either of us.

It’s strange, the places the mind wanders when everything else is still.

With the storm groaning around me, I drift back through the last twenty years — the life we chose, the life we built, the life that felt so certain.

We never wanted children. That wasn’t a compromise or a hesitation; it was who we were. We traveled everywhere, chasing whims and late-night recommendations, eating our way through foreign cities, letting stories find me in cafés and airport terminals. I wrote novels in stolen corners of the world. He built a career in private equity, always so self-assured, so steady. For twenty years we lived exactly how we wanted.

Then my mother fell ill.

Alzheimer’s.

Two years of fading — her memories collapsing in on themselves.

I always thought grief came all at once; I didn’t know it could arrive in waves.

He was there through all of it: holding her hand long after she stopped responding, learning the names of her childhood friends just so he could repeat them to her on the good days. Something shifted in me watching him do that. Maybe it was the hospice nurse who told me that some people forget everything except the feeling of being loved.

In that moment, I understood: I wanted a piece of us to remain in the world, long after time had moved past our names.

So we tried. First with laughter and optimism. My forty-four-year-old body fought me every step of the way. Month after month, nothing. Eventually the doctor started using phrases like “diminished ovarian reserve,” and we nodded like people pretending to hear a language they don’t speak.

Fertility treatments followed. Needles, charts, ultrasounds, medications that tasted like metal. But then—miracle of miracles—we were pregnant. I still remember the trembling in my hands when I showed him the test strip. He cried. I bought a tiny pair of ivory booties I hid in the dresser.

I dreamed of her. I imagined dark curls like my mother’s, his smile, a resilience I prayed I could give her.

And then, six days ago, in a bland exam room, the ultrasound screen went still.

“There’s no heartbeat.”

The world buckled. The doctor spoke, the nurse touched my shoulder, forms were handed to us. I was numb. I remember almost nothing except the delivery itself — laboring for a child who would never cry, holding a body that would never warm. They wrapped her in a blanket printed with tiny pink stars.

Since then, my husband and I have drifted around each other like ghosts. He keeps saying we should try again. I keep saying I’m done. The arguments feel muffled, not shouted. Every word is slow and heavy.

My thoughts wander. Will he leave me for someone younger? Would I blame him if he did?

***

My mind drifts to a different winter, years ago, long before grief began carving its quiet channels through us.

The night we bought this house.

It was barely furnished — just a mattress on the floor, two mismatched plates, and a half-working radio we’d brought in from the car. We lit a fire even though the chimney smoked a little back then. Snow fell outside in lazy flakes, soft and harmless.

When the radio crackled into life, Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran played on the nearest Top 40 station.

Without a word, he took my hand.

We danced barefoot on the creaky floorboards, spinning clumsily between boxes and paint cans, laughing when I stepped on his toes. The firelight made our shadows huge on the walls, like two larger, braver versions of ourselves were dancing right beside us. I remember his forehead pressing against mine, his breath warm, his hands steady on my waist. His lips down my neck and along my collarbone.

We made love in front of the fire that night. Snow piled quietly outside the windows, the world hushed in its own kind of grace. Everything felt possible then.

It’s strange how that memory comes back now.

***

The fire snaps loudly, pulling me back to the present.

And then the doorbell rings.

At first I think it’s the storm — a branch, a piece of ice hitting the porch rail. But then it rings again, clear and sharp, cutting through the quiet.

No one comes up here. Certainly not at ten p.m. in a blizzard.

My heart kicks hard against my ribs as I stand, moving toward the front door in my fluffy pajamas, the fire casting long shadows behind me. When I open the door, the wind slams into me, flinging snow into the entryway.

The porch is a blur of white. The front yard, the road — all gone. But down at the edge of the driveway, just visible between gusts of snow, a bundled figure is running. Too far to call out to. Too fast to chase. The storm swallows them whole.

And then I see it.

A car seat.

Right there on the welcome mat.

I freeze. The world narrows to a single point: the tiny body inside, wrapped in a pale blanket, pink face scrunched in sleep, chest rising and falling with fragile determination. Next to the seat is a cardboard box tied neatly with twine.

I scoop up the carrier. The baby is warm. Real. Alive. Breathing.

Inside, my hands shake as I grab my phone. No service. The towers have been out since noon. We are cut off.

A soft, questioning cry rises from the car seat.

“James,” I whisper to no one, and then I’m running upstairs to wake him.

The baby cries again when I lift her, but it’s a tiny sound, almost polite. She curls instinctively into my chest, her cheek brushing the cotton of my pajama shirt, and something inside me breaks open.

James descends the stairs quickly, barefoot and shivering, and stops when he sees her.

“What… is that?” It’s a stupid question. It’s also the only one either of us could manage.

“A baby,” I whisper. “Someone left her here.”

We work in silence at first. The weight of the moment presses down on us until breathing feels like something we have to remember how to do.

I open the cardboard box. Formula. Bottles. Diapers. Wipes. A blanket covered in tiny stars.

My vision blurs. James steadies himself on the counter.

We prepare the bottle together, our hands brushing, and the baby drinks in small, greedy gulps. When she exhales a tiny sigh, I feel it in the hollow place behind my heart.

“We have to call the police,” James says quietly.

“There’s no service.”

“When it comes back.”

“When it comes back,” I echo, though neither of us moves toward the phone again.

We bathe her in the kitchen sink using warm water from a pot on the wood stove. She startles, then relaxes, limbs softening. I wash her hair slowly, reverently.

James dries her with shaking hands. We tuck her into a basket near the fire, layering blankets around her until she looks like a tiny bundled North Star.

Then the silence comes.

He lowers himself onto the floor beside me, close enough that our knees touch. The firelight makes everything look softer than it should; him, me, the tiny bundle sleeping between us.

“We have to think about what happens next,” he says quietly.

I nod, though neither of us moves.

The flames crack and shift, sending warm light across the baby’s face. She stirs, a small twitch beneath the blanket, and something in both of us leans toward her instinctively — not out of decision, just… reaction. Muscle memory from a life we never got to have.

“This isn’t simple,” he murmurs.

“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”

A silence settles, thicker than the storm outside.

For a long time we just sit like that, shoulder to shoulder, the two of us watching the rise and fall of a newborn’s breath. The fire pops. The wind claws at the windows.

“She’s so small,” he says.

I swallow. “She is.”

Another beat of silence.

His hand finds mine on the floor.

“What do we do?” he asks, barely above a whisper.

The storm answers first, hurling itself against the house in a rush of white. The baby shifts, lets out a tiny sigh, and settles again.

“I don’t know,” I say.

We sit there in the hush of the blizzard, the three of us, suspended in a moment that feels too fragile to move.