November was the worst month.

I couldn’t tell that to the more-money-than-sense skiers who’d descended on my tiny Colorado town like so many snowflakes. I lived in paradise, a woman had just gushed to me while I’d been scanning her groceries at Natural Alpine Fine Foods & Deli.

I worked at one of no fewer than four supermarkets in town designed to cater to the kinds of tourists who liked to buy things that came in earthy brown packaging for twice the price.

I must be so lucky, the woman had said, to live in a place of such natural beauty.

I’d bit my lip and not told her the truth: That I’d trade all this natural beauty in a hot second for her designer handbag and the nice home and lifestyle that probably came with it.

I stepped around a patch of ice. A plaintive meow sounded to my left, and I crouched down as an underfed gray tabby wound her way out from under a snow-covered bush and into a pool of lamplight. She looked as cold as I was, and no healthier than she’d been last week despite all the food I’d left out for her.

There were dozens of cats like this in town, all cold and cautious and with their ribs sticking out. This one was the only stray that would let me get near her. She headbutted my hand and a gravelly purr started somewhere in her tiny body.

“Looks like you had a worse day than I did,” I said, scratching behind her ears. “Poor baby. Are you hungry?”

I wasn’t supposed to feed stray cats, according to my apartment contract.

Then again, I was supposed to be able to expect a water heater larger than the average teakettle, too, and windows that didn’t leak, although neither of those were in my contract because it had never occurred to me to insist on them.

The cat followed me to my ground-floor apartment, then paced in front of the doorway when I went inside. I’d tried to persuade her to come indoors several times, and she’d always declined.

Not that I could blame her. My shabby one-bedroom wasn’t that much warmer than the outside, and it smelled like decades-old mildew. I didn’t like it any more than she did.

I kept my coat on and poured a cup of kibble into a stained plastic container, then set it on the porch. The cat dove in, purring hard enough to make her tiny body quiver.

I left her there and went to get the mail from the dilapidated community box a few doors down from mine. A light snow began to fall while I pulled the slightly damp envelopes from my slot.

“Bills, bills, junk mail, bill,” I announced, flipping through them under my porch light and hating the way the names of places like my power company and local urgent care made my stomach churn.

The cat glanced up at me, then went back to her dinner. I’d almost be willing to trade places with her. She didn’t seem exactly happy to be living out here in the cold, but then, she didn’t have to pay $250 to a clinic for what had turned out to be an anxiety attack.

I put my hand on the doorknob to go back inside and drown the dread rising in my stomach with what was probably going to be a near-poisonous cocktail of old sitcoms, too-spicy tortilla chips, and the cheapest wine I’d been able to find at Natural Alpine. Before I could get inside, though, my neighbor’s door opened and her face peeked out.

“I thought I heard you out here,” Eloise said.

I tensed, then sighed and turned to say hello.

Eloise was the only neighbor I had gotten to know in two years of living here. She was eighty-one years old and also fed the strays, which was the primary reason I always stopped for a minute of conversation even when I felt like going inside and hiding from the world until it was time to go to sleep.

“How was work?” she said.

“Same old,” I said.

I shoved the envelopes in my pocket.

“I sure enjoyed those oranges you brought me,” she said.

She cracked the door open wider, revealing a floral housedress under a lavender cardigan and beige orthopedic shoes. Eloise always looked like she was about to go for a walk on Easter morning.

I liked that about her. Everything about this town hinted at Christmas: the snow, the skiing, the gingerbread shops on Main Street. I’d never been a fan of the fake cheer of Christmas, and although Eloise already had her tree up, her clothes still seemed like they were rebelling against the whole season.

“Citrus fruits will be better in a month or so,” I said.

“No, they were perfect,” she said. “I’m the richest woman alive!”

I smiled because she was smiling, but the words made my gut twist.

I wished I could feel like the richest woman alive by owning half a bag of oranges. Instead, I just felt like every other twenty-something with twenty-thousand dollars of student loan debt and no degree to show for it: panicked and like I wished the snow would just keep falling until it buried me alive.

“Sure is cold out there,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to take my garbage out for twenty minutes now, but gosh darn it, I just don’t want to.”

I laughed, because listening to Eloise say “gosh darn it” like those were actual curse words was one of the few highlights of my life.

“I can take it,” I said.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t, honey.”

“I’ve still got my coat on.”

She hemmed and hawed and then shuffled off to get the garbage. We did this every few weeks. She handed it off and patted me on the cheek with a warm, dry hand.

“You’re a good girl,” she said. “I hope you appreciate yourself.”

“You too,” I said. “You should go back inside before you freeze.”

“Too late for that,” she chuckled, shutting the door.

The garbage bag swung at my side as I walked around the building to the Dumpsters. It was a long walk up the complex’s driveway to get there, and the ground was slick with ice. I was glad it had snowed. The run-down buildings in this part of town only ever looked nice after a fresh layer of white.

My phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket with my free hand, looked at the screen, and hit Dismiss.

It rang again.

“What?” I said.

A slurred voice on the other end of the phone greeted me with a “Well, that’s a nice way to greet your mother.”

I hung up.

A counselor in college had told me to set healthy boundaries and only agree to talk to my mother when she was sober. Mom and I had managed exactly one conversation since then: A barrage of complaints, directed at me, about how the father I hadn’t seen in three years had ruined her life.

It was the kind of relationship every daughter dreamed about.

I threw Eloise’s garbage in the Dumpster with more force than was necessary and turned around for the long trudge home. It was dark here, away from the lamps on the street, and something about the darkness was nice. I felt like I could hide in it.

All I wanted to do these days was hide. I’d shut off my social media months ago to get a break from the endless politics and pictures of random distant relatives’ kids, and my friends hadn’t exactly been blowing up my phone since then with texts or emails or anything that could be mistaken for a real conversation.

Weirdly, I was okay with that. It had gotten too exhausting hearing all the engagement announcements when I was single, all the pregnancy announcements when I could barely afford to feed the stray cats, and all the vacation stories when the most traveling I’d managed since dropping out of college was my trip to this disappointing little town.

I’d thought it was going to be an adventure, living here. I’d thought the same thing as the woman at the grocery store, that I’d have an amazing time working in one of America’s most beautiful natural playgrounds.

But it turned out that work was work no matter where you did it, and apartments didn’t magically get more affordable in vacation hotspots.

The sound of jingling Christmas bells floated to me from out on the street. In the last week, I’d already seen a baby stroller covered in tinsel and a giant wreath attached to the spare tire on a Jeep.

People got into the holidays here. I couldn’t wait for them to be over.

Off in the distance, probably at the park a block down, I heard a kid shout in excitement. Their happy shriek was muffled by the cold and punctuated by my own worn-out shoes crunching on old ice. I missed being a kid and going to parks to play in the snow. Mom would never take me, of course, but it had never been hard to find a friend.

I couldn’t have imagined then how different adulthood was going to be.

The kid shouted again.

They seemed closer, this time, and less excited.

They sounded alarmed.

I turned, wondering if someone needed help, and was met with a thud and the sound of cracking wood. An enormous horse-drawn sleigh slid across the ice toward me, and the person who’d been shouting was not a kid but rather a woman, and her face was a mask of absolute panic.

“Move!” she screamed, and then I was on the ground, and there was blood, and everything spun around me and went dark.