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K enneth leaves early the next morning, pulling his beloved Monte Carlo out into the gently drifting snow. It’s still dark out, but Judith gets up early fix to his breakfast and to see him off, clutching the neck of her robe shut against the cold.

“I’ll see you in a week, my love!” he calls out of the driver’s side window.

Judith blows him a kiss and calls out, “I love you! Be safe!”

And then the headlights sweep over her, and then he’s gone.

She goes back inside and turns the lock. They’re isolated out here, but you can never be too careful. Judith’s feral childhood taught her how dangerous empty woods can be.

The house feels cold and dark and sterile, except for the kitchen, which has the remains of breakfast soaking in the sink. Judith looks at them for a long time.

Then she goes back to bed.

When she wakes up again, two hours later, the bedroom is flooded with grey winter sunlight. She read in the newspaper that a snowstorm is supposed to hit this afternoon, and she can already feel it edging closer to their sprawling house in the woods. At least Kenneth’s flight will have already taken off by now.

Judith gets dressed in front of the enormous plate glass window that looks out at the forest, taking her time pulling on her thick woolen trousers and slouchy turtleneck sweater. Kenneth hates when she does this, always worried that some wayward hunter traipsing through the trees will see her, but Judith likes the little thrill of it, standing naked before the entire world.

When she’s dressed, she goes through her usual makeup routine, out of habit more than anything. She curls and teases her hair. Then she goes into the kitchen and brews a fresh pot of coffee, still ignoring the dishes in the sink. The snowfall from Kenneth’s departure has slacked off, but the sky is heaving with the impending storm.

Judith puts on her snow boots and takes her coffee out to the little courtyard nestled between the two wings of the house. The house was designed forty years ago by Kenneth’s idol Herbert Erlich, an architect who trained under Frank Lloyd Wright, and this house was his magnum opus. It was designed, Kenneth told her when they moved in, to blend into the lines and patterns of the forest. In nice weather you can open all the windows and bring the forest into the house; in the winter, you can shut them to trap the warmth. But it’s all windows, so you can see everything: The forest. The sky. The courtyard, which right now is covered in a fresh layer of snow. As Judith drinks her coffee, she can see her reflection in the windows across the way, Kenneth’s office dark behind them.

Judith likes the house, although she likes it better during the mild summers, when everything is open and she can smell the cedar and pine as she tends to her chores. In the winter, the house feels like ice, even though it’s warm from the central heat blasting out of the furnace vents and the gas fireplaces scattered around the various parlors and sitting rooms. It’s the windows—all those windows with their views of the endless snowy landscape. It’ll be worse with the storm. The newspaper said they should expect up to two feet of snow.

Judith drifts through the courtyard until her coffee’s too cold to drink, then she goes inside and heats it back up in the microwave, an expensive appliance she still finds marvelous. She watches her coffee mug spin around inside, zapped by invisible energy rays, and tries to decide what she wants to do first, now that Kenneth is gone for a week.

The fallout shelter , she thinks, right as the microwave beeps. She pulls it open and her coffee steams like it’s fresh.

The fallout shelter is the one part of the house she has never seen. It was built in the 1950s, added not by the architect but by his son, who built it, Kenneth said, against his father’s will. “Can you imagine?” he said when they first discovered the entrance—a grey cinderblock door hidden behind a pair of inkberry shrubs. “Erlich was dying of throat cancer and he still tried to put a stop to it.”

“What’s in it?” Judith asked.

“Nothing,” Kenneth wrapped his arm around her waist and tugged her back toward the house. “Dust. Rotted canned goods.”

That was shortly after they moved in, but Kenneth has always been strange about the fallout shelter. He says they should ignore it, that it’s not part of Erlich’s original designs for the house and should be treated as an affront. But he goes in there. Judith knows that he does. She’s seen him when she’s mopping the floors in the formal dining room, which is the only part of the house where the windows face the shelter entrance. He’ll go for one of his walks but emerge from behind the inkberry shrubs, his hands tucked in his pockets.

She asked him about it only once, three months ago. All summer long, she had watched Kenneth walk to and from the fallout shelter. Every weekend, he would flit around that entrance like a bumblebee.

One day, while he was in the office, she walked down there and found an enormous silver padlock on the door.

Curiosity burned her from the inside out. And something else, too. A sense of dread.

She finally conjured up the courage to ask him about it after summer faded into autumn. It was a particularly pleasant Friday evening, her thoughts warm and blurred from drinking sangria during a dinner party. All their friends had gone home, and it was just her and Kenneth tucked into bed, the moon bright through the bedroom windows.

“Have you been fixing up the fallout shelter?” she asked, posing the question suddenly, like an ambush.

“What?” Kenneth laughed. “Darling, you know how I feel about that thing. Of course not.”

“There’s a lock on the door.”

“Well, yes. I was worried about the local kids trying to break in.” Kenneth put a bookmark into his book and turned toward her, his cheeks rosy from being out in the sun.

Judith had never seen local kids on their property. She still hasn’t, to this day.

But she didn’t have time to say that to him, because Kenneth leaned forward and kissed her. “Don’t worry about that old hole in the ground,” he muttered, kissing along her neck. “It’s not bombs from the Soviets we have to worry about anymore. It’s radicals at home.”

Then he pushed her back onto the mattress and rolled on top of her, his breath warm against her cheek as he slid up her nightgown. Judith knew he was distracting her. But it was a welcome distraction, having him touch her.

And a month and a half later, she realized she was pregnant.

Still, she notices things. Like how she no longer sees him stepping out from behind the inkberry shrubs, although he still goes for long walks in the forest on the weekends. Or she’ll wake up and find his side of the bed empty. “Insomnia, ” he said once, unprompted. “I’m just worried about work.”

She’s seen a light bouncing through the trees like a will-o-the-wisp, late at night, on those nights when he doesn’t stay in bed.

Judith knows that there’s a bolt cutter in the garage. Kenneth has quite a workshop of tools in there, in fact. It would be easy, she thinks as she drinks the last of her coffee in the kitchen, to cut the lock and buy another before he returns. He took the car, but she can call a cab to take her into town once the snow’s cleared. She has a week, after all.

It’ll be worth the trouble to see what he’s hiding underground.