Elena pulled out her phone. She texted her sister in Phoenix, where winter was a theory, not a fact.

For Elena, winter started on the second Tuesday of November.

In most of the country, winter starts twice.

She was driving back from the grocery store in Missoula, Montana, when the sky turned the color of an old bruise. The wind had been quiet all morning—unusually so, which should have been her first warning. By 2 p.m., the first flakes appeared, not falling so much as materializing sideways. By 3 p.m., the plows were out, groaning their low hymns along the highway.