“You miss the snow?” Hugh asked.

“Feels like sleet,” Maya said, pulling up a milk crate.

She found Hugh inside the woolshed, stoking the potbelly stove. He was a third-generation vigneron, his hands stained with earth and his laugh like gravel.

Maya thought about it. “Sometimes. But I think I’d miss this more if I left.”

Outside, the winter solstice light began its early fade. The hills turned violet. A single kookaburra laughed somewhere in the gloom—not at the cold, Maya decided, but with it.

Maya zipped her fleece to her chin and stepped onto the veranda of the old cottage. The temperature read four degrees Celsius—nothing by Canadian standards, she knew, but this damp cold was a different animal. She pulled a knitted beanie over her ears and smiled. Two years in Australia, and she still couldn't get used to a winter solstice without a white Christmas. Instead, the vines across the valley were bare skeletons, the grass a faded khaki, and the sky a low, bruised pearl.