Misha pulls the fur coat tighter and fastens the braided frog at her throat. Her breath is a cloud, the sky clear and filled with stars, and the frozen archipelago deep and vast as the ocean. Up and down the shore, the flames of small fires cast long flickering shadows onto the ice. She sits on the bench and steps into her skates, pulls the laces tight and double-knots them. Out on the ice, as far as she can see, silhouettes glide, couples holding hands, mothers and fathers pulling bundled sleds, single forms in leisurely motion and others flying fast. Tsh tsh tsh the ice whispers.
     She stands, feeling tall and loose-limbed, reties her fur hat under her chin and pushes off. As she’d heard, the ice is unusually smooth, and in an instant she is thirty feet from where she started. The cloud cover has lifted, and low in the eastern sky, the moon is rising, almost full tonight, and she knows that by the time she is at Nämdö, the archipelago will be brighter at midnight than at any time today, brighter at midnight than at noon.
     Her skates tic tic tic across the ice, the moon slowly rises, and she thinks about yesterday evening, about Niklas and how he opened the tiny box and held it out to her, as though he were the only man who had ever offered a ring to a woman since the beginning of the universe. “I’ve carried it in my pocket for over a week,” he said, “waiting for just the right moment.”
     A star sapphire, because she’d told him once she would not wear a diamond, and he’d remembered. The ring seemed to glow from within with a cold blue light, while all around them was warmth—the crackle of the fire in the huge hearth, the golden glow of candlelight, the warm murmur of content diners. He hadn’t asked her a thing, just eased the ring from its cushioned slot and slid it onto her finger.
     Just to her right, a lone skater slides by, a man pushing across the ice so strongly, he is gone in moments. She slips her gloved hand inside her coat pocket and feels the shape of the ring box, pictures the sapphire inside, denied its glitter in the absence of light.
     She wore it through dinner and beyond, held it up to the mirrored wall in the powder room, feeling the strangeness of its smooth cool weight on her finger. Her father had given her a ring once. A single pearl nestled in a golden leaf. “This was formed over many many years,” he told her, recounting its coming into being from nothing more than the irritation from a single grain of sand. It had seemed like a novelty at the time, but she’s come to understand how irritation is more often reformed than removed. The oyster has no choice. But she does, and still she spins her own glassy armor more often than not.
     She loves Niklas. She loves him for his patience and his humor and his orderly mind. But he will not skate with her. He will not trace words on her bare back. He will not climb the fire escape to leave a message on her bathroom window written backwards so she can read it, Jag alskar dig. I love you. But of course, he will live, because he will never travel to Norway to climb the smooth ice walls of Trollväggen and then not return. He will give her a beautiful ring with a cold star at its center instead of a circle of knotted string.
     By the time she is approaching Nämdö, the nearly perfect circle of the moon has risen high and the ice sheet is bright. It’s surface is even smoother here because few skaters come this far, and although it’s very cold, she is warm from the exertion. In a short while, when she turns back toward the tiny lights of Stockholm, it will be officially the 23rd of February and Per will have been dead two years.
     Nämdö looms ahead, ragged and snow-crusted in the expanse of  smooth glass surrounding it. Her skates schur to a stop, and she stands there a while, wanting to be very sure about her choice, giving herself one more opportunity to doubt her decision. But under the light of this naked moon, with the clear cold air reaching to the stars, she is as certain as she can be that there is no sanctuary from loss, and that love is something that should burn like the bonfires on the shore rather than cast mere warmth like the pallid winter sun.
     She reaches into her pocket, takes out the ring box, and pitches it as hard as she can toward the island.
     With the moon behind her now, she skates toward her shadow, much faster than she came. There are no more skaters passing in any direction, and she imagines it a hundred years ago, the howls of wolves following and gaining on her, their yellow eyes glowing around the black silhouette of her shape at their center.
     She wonders if it will ever be found, and who will find it. If it will bury itself in the earth, a hard round shape layered by leaves and rain and ice and snow. Or if the sea water will lap it to its bottom and it will lie there undiscovered as the decades come and go. Or if some day she will shake someone’s smooth hand and the cool globe of the sapphire will press against her dry, wrinkled skin.