I told him the machine was ours and that it was going to keep us warm.

And he asked again in almost the same words, and I realized he wanted to know whether I was sure.

So, I told him the truth as I understood it, not if I can stop it.

Then I did what I do in any emergency, which is to make a list and walk it in order.

I slid the bar across the overhead door and tested the latch on the man door that leads to the yard.

Rachel took Noah into the family room, lit the wood stove, and wrapped him in blankets beside it.

And I heard her humming, which is what she does when she is holding something down.

I carried gas cans across from the shed, checked the oil, and laid out the cable.

The generator would have to be rolled outside onto the sheltered pad beside the house before I started it.

I remember how quiet it was, only the wind pulling at the eaves and my own breath in my ears.

For the length of one short trip back to the shed to fetch a coil of cord I had forgotten, I left the man door unlatched.

I was gone perhaps 90 seconds.

On the way back across the yard, I heard a sound I would know anywhere.

The rattling, sliding rumble of an overhead door rising in its track.

I had heard it 10,000 times in my life.

And until that moment, it had never made my stomach drop.

I ran around the corner of the garage and saw the door standing open, a bright rectangle of dark and snow, and Trish Whitmore inside it with both hands locked on my generator’s frame, hauling it backward across the concrete toward her SUV.

The generator weighed close to 200 lb, and Trish had tilted it back onto its wheels and was hauling it with her whole body, leaning against the weight like a woman towing a stalled car.

The wheels had packed with snow at the threshold and stopped turning, so the front foot of the frame was scraping across the ice in a long groove.

She had already pulled it out through the open door and 10 ft down my driveway when I came around the corner.

Her breath came in hard white bursts.

Then she looked up, saw me, and shouted the sentence I told you about at the beginning at the top of her lungs as if the whole street were an audience.

That heater is mine.

Every instinct I owned told me to run at her and rip the frame out of her grip.