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again. She tosses her sunglasses on the dash and stares hard at the last number as she sits, trembling, inside the freezing front seat of her car. There’s no mistake. The number from Joe’s burner phone stares up at her from the Night Sky background of her cell.

V
    MAGGIE
    M aggie Brennan opens her eyes. She glances up at a small skylight, like the one in the book about Heidi and the grandfather on the mountain. The illustrations in the book intrigued her as a child, especially the picture of a makeshift bed where Heidi slept beneath a window in the roof. It’s what sold Maggie on this place. The skylight. “Yes,” the landlord said when she’d remarked on it. “A renovation. Costly, but it adds so much light to what could otherwise be a little dreary.”
    It’s still a little dreary.
    But Maggie likes it. She likes to monitor the light herself—how much comes in, how much doesn’t. She yawns, switches on a small flat-screen TV across the room. A home remodel burbles in the silence of early morning as Maggie lies buried under multicolored quilts, coveting the claw-foot tub, the large black and white square tiles of a bathroom renovation on HGTV.
    The skylight turns a lighter gray. A cough slides through the wall. Maggie rolls out of bed and heads for the shower as, on TV, a couple walks across newly installed laminate.
    She’d left her car at work the night before and taken the train home. The main roads are clear, the small ones soon will be. Still, she was nervous about driving in the storm, made a snap decision she regrets now. She’ll have to take the train in.
    She slips on a sweater from the Loft and sticks an English muffin in the toaster. Nearly everything is within arm’s reach of everything else. Her apartment is a closet. “But just look, darling! A skylight!” her mother said when she first saw it, even though she almost never comes to visit. Four flights of stairs! Maggie stuffs the remnants of her breakfast in the garbage disposal and flips the switch for a few seconds, rattling cups and spoons on the counter. She leans across the bed for the remote—the skylight is an odd cream color where the sun slants in, where the glass isn’t covered in snow. She sticks on leather gloves and steps into her boots, unbolts the door, and slips into the hall.
    She’d stayed home the night of that last bad storm, brought in dinner from the deli down the street. With her job at the insurance company, she at least has regular, daytime hours, unlike before, so she can decide things like this, when to stay in, when to go out. Although most people opted to stay off the streets that Friday night, far too many were out driving when they should have stayed at home. Inside. The phones at Mass Casualty and Life have been ringing off the hook ever since; the office is drowning in claims. She pulls up her coat collar and picks her way across the mounds of white. Two girls lie in a patch of perfect snow, moving their arms, making angels before it’s all a dirty brown, covered with boot prints. A woman stands in the doorway, shouting, shivering in a pink robe. Maggie waves—it’s a neighbor she sees sometimes at the corner market, with its granite steps, its bananas and fresh fish in summer. The woman gestures at the snowy street, raises her hands, and shakes her head as the girls run toward her, laughing, pushing at each other, their angel selves left in the snow.
    After she came back to the States, Maggie could have stayed much longer with her mother, but she chose to come here where she has no past, where she waves to people she knows only from the corner market. The house in Southie where she grew up was confining after only a few weeks. She felt like a butterfly trapped too long in its cocoon, her wings pinned to her sides.
    Her train whizzes into the station, stops with a loud squeal. She waits. Finally, the train sighs, the doors begin to close,