Pierre opens the freezer in the lounge as I open the trash can, tossing my tea bag in. Luckily, no one’s said anything about the mug I broke, even though I was afraid I’d be relegated to only sipping water from my cupped hands or something.

“Travis!” Pierre shouts, his wiry frame perfectly upright, his eyes closed.

“Yo,” Travis responds from across the room, where he’s sitting on a couch, using his laptop.

“You cannot put samples in the lounge freezer,” Pierre says, his eyes still closed, his back rigid. “I’m well aware that the proper storage facility is in another building, and you don’t like going outside because it’s cold, but this freezer is for food and you absolutely, positively—”

“It’s just dirt,” Travis says, looking bewildered. “It’s not like, meat or shit or anything.”

“If it’s dirt, why is it in the freezer?” Pierre asks, exasperated.

“So it doesn’t thaw.”

“What does it matter if dirt thaws?”

“Well, there’s organisms in the permafrost,” Travis says, twirling his pen around in his fingers. “And so I need to put them under the microscope when I get a chance, but I dunno if thawing them—”

“If there are organisms then it is not just dirt, is it?!” Pierre exclaims. “That, Travis, is precisely why we have separate storage for…”

I take my leave of the lounge, because while it’s true that Travis shouldn’t be storing dirt samples in the same freezer where people get ice for drinking, Pierre can really get going sometimes, and I just can’t take it right now.

I hobble down the hallway. Past the spot where I last saw Wilder, where he kissed me and I broke the mug and then ran away, and just like I have for the past two days, I wonder if I fucked up.

I wonder if I’m too cautious, if I should be more trusting, more open, more willing to believe that people can change. I wonder if I should follow my heart more instead of my brain, because while my brain seems great for most things, I’m not sure this is one of them.

I just know that there’s still a few tiny splotches on the wall where whoever cleaned it up missed a spot, and looking at them hurts. It feels like there’s a fish hook connected to my ribcage and someone’s trying to reel me in, pulling me backwards with a sharp pain somewhere in my heart-region.

It feels a little like I can’t breathe when I think of him saying I loved you and couldn’t admit it.

Then I shake my head slightly and continue on. I’ve got movement data that needs transcribing, some scat samples waiting in the proper storage area that I should really deal with, and I’ve been thinking of starting a blog about the many and varied romantic tribulations of the musk oxen I’ve been watching.

It’s much more dramatic than you’d think.

“Hey, Imogen!” a voice calls out behind me.

I turn, careful not to spill my tea.

“Phone call,” calls Kelly.

My heart clenches and my skin goes cold because I immediately wonder what awful thing has happened that would make my parents call out of the blue like this, instead of emailing or Skyping or something.

My brother was in a car crash, I think.

One of my parents had a heart attack.

My dad fell while skiing and broke his hip, and since he’s starting to get up there in years that’s pretty bad, though replacement hip technology has come a really long way lately…

The research station has a landline, sort of, though it’s through a satellite so I don’t know if you can exactly call it that. I head into the office-type-room, where the receiver is just hanging out on a desk and Kelly sits down again, looks at her computer.

Wilder crashed his plane again. He really did it, just to prove something, that moron…

“Hello?” I say, panic clutching my chest.

Mentally, I run through all the bad things that could have happened, my mind a cacophony of crashes and spills and hospital beds. Why else call here, like this?

“Hey there, Squeaks,” Wilder says, his voice perfectly relaxed and casual.

I freeze, blinking in surprise. I wasn’t expecting him, not at all.

I swallow hard, my mouth dry.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. At the desk, Kelly ignores me studiously, trying to act like she’s not listening but of course she is. She’s five feet away.

Wilder chuckles.

“What’s wrong is I hadn’t talked to you in a few days,” he says. “I like the sound of your voice.”

I turn toward the wall, where there’s a safety poster about how to treat hypothermia. Every room’s got one.

“You called the station,” I say.

“Your parents wouldn’t give me your phone number so I had to get creative if I wanted to talk to you,” he says, his voice low and slow, almost a drawl. “I might have made up some story about needing to double-check a serial number on a microscope so that my company could send up a replacement. You do have microscopes up there, right?”

“Of course we have microscopes,” I say, off-handedly. “You just called to… call?”

“Is it that strange?”

“Kind of,” I say, still feeling hesitant. “You’re sure that nothing terrible has happened and you’re not just soft-pedaling it because you think I’m going to freak out if you tell me my brother was in a car crash?”

“Squeaks, I promise that if your brother was in a car crash I’m the absolute last person on this green earth that your parents would tell,” he says, a smile in his voice. “If he has, I don’t know shit about it. I just know I wanted to talk to you.”

I’m relaxing, slowly, though I’m still suspicious of this new called just to talk thing. Doesn’t Wilder know that people don’t do that, at least not anymore? I mean, my mom will call her friends just to talk, but she’s in her fifties.

“Okay,” I say slowly, excruciatingly aware that I’m in a semi-public place where Kelly is half-listening and anyone else at the station could waltz in at any second.

“Do I have permission to proceed?” he teases. “If you’ve got musk oxen telenovela drama to go observe, I can call you back.”

I could tell him no. I could tell him never to call me again, tell him that I’m not interested in hearing about rich peoples’ skiing foibles or telling him about how hard Pierre freaks out every time someone leaves something in the fridge for more than three days.

And I shouldn’t be. I should have moved on ages ago, should have forgotten all about the boy with the bottomless eyes and the smile that makes me feel like the rest of the world’s evaporated.

But I didn’t, and now here I am.

“Don’t call me on this line,” I say, my heart squeezing in my chest. “It’s really for official station business, and there’s no cell reception up here, but we’ve got Wi-Fi and Skype.”