Chapter 1

My husband was sent to the Alaskan North Slope oil fields for two hundred days. We promised to video call for half an hour every day.

It was our agreement, my only comfort during the long winter nights.

On day 199, my son pointed at the tablet screen, his face full of innocence.

"Daddy, the tree outside your window was bare yesterday. How did it grow leaves today?"

The screen went black. He cut the feed.

...

The second the screen went dark, my heart skipped a beat.

A familiar coldness shot up from my feet. It was the same feeling I get when handling a PR crisis at work―an adrenaline spike, alarm bells screaming in my head.

I immediately called back.

Ring... ring...

It went straight to voicemail.

My phone buzzed. A text from Mark.

"Babe, the signal suddenly dropped. The satellite network up here is unstable."

"It was just the screen lagging, the pixels were blurry. Don't overthink it."

"It's twenty below zero in this godforsaken Arctic Circle. How could a tree possibly grow leaves?"

The more he explained, the tighter my grip on the phone became, my knuckles turning white.

I looked down at my son, who was staring up at me with an innocent look, and I forced a smile.

"Leo, Daddy's internet is bad. We'll try him again tomorrow, okay?"

"But Mommy, I really saw green leaves."

"You saw wrong, sweetie. The screen just flickered."

I tucked him into bed and read him half of Goodnight, Moon until his breathing became slow and steady.

My voice was calm, not a single tremor, but my fingertips were uncontrollably cold.

I gently closed his door and didn't turn on the lights.

The darkness of the living room enveloped me like thick ink. I leaned against the door, gasping for air.

Don't panic, Sarah. You can't panic.

You've handled media firestorms a hundred times worse than this.

I walked into my office and opened my laptop.

After Mark left for his assignment, we set up automatic recording for our video calls so our son could see his father anytime.

One hundred and ninety-nine days of video logs were lined up in the cloud folder like silent tombstones.

I clicked on today's recording.

I dragged the progress bar to the last few seconds.

I saw Mark on the screen, wearing a thick fleece jacket. Behind him was the window of his shipping-container dorm, which should have looked out onto a snow-covered tundra.

He was smiling, telling me the project team was having a pizza party to celebrate his upcoming return to Chicago.

Then, Leo's childish voice piped up.

"Daddy, the tree outside your window was bare yesterday. How did it grow leaves today?"

As my son pointed, the camera shook slightly.

In the frame, behind Mark, a single, vibrant green sprout of leaves had impossibly appeared on a bare tree branch.

It was like a clumsy magic trick, a dead tree brought to life in a single second.

Mark's face froze.

The next second, the screen went black.

I paused the frame.

Yesterday, the day before, the day before that...

I pulled up the recordings from the past week.

Same window, same angle, same dead tree.