Just five days, up near the Selkirk Range with a cooler and a quiet lake and no cell signal, the kind of trip that resets something in your head that the regular world spends all year tightening. I had been looking forward to it for weeks. When I came back down into range and felt my phone start buzzing with all the things I had missed, I ignored it. When I turned onto my road and saw the golden late-afternoon light cutting through the tall pines the way it does in September, I felt the particular satisfaction of coming home to a place that has stayed exactly how you left it.

That feeling lasted about forty seconds.I slowed the truck halfway up the driveway because something registered as wrong before I could name it. Not alarming exactly, just off, the way your eye catches something out of place before your brain finishes processing what it is. Then I saw it. Concrete. Fresh and pale and completely wrong against the dark earth, stretching across the full width of my driveway like someone had decided the road simply ended there. Wooden forms still in place on either side. Rebar sticking up in a row, rusted red against the late sky. Tire tracks circling the whole area from whatever equipment had done the pour.