By the time they reached the city, the sun had set. The train station was a cavern of yellow light and echoing footsteps. Mr. Ellison stood up, put on his hat, and looked at her.

Clara thought of her mother’s sandwich, now eaten. She thought of the five-dollar bill, folded in her shoe. She thought of the typing class that started tomorrow morning, in a beige room full of other girls learning to be secretaries.

That is the Munro way. The story doesn’t end with what happened. It ends with what almost happened, and what never left.

She said, “How would we get there?”

And Clara went inside, climbed the stairs to her tiny room, and lay on the bed in her coat. She thought about the swans. She thought about how they commit to the water, how they cannot change their minds. She thought about the man on the train, and how he had offered her not a proposition, but a vision. And that was perhaps more dangerous, because a vision you carry with you forever.

Alice Munro once wrote about a girl on a train, about the fine, almost invisible line between menace and longing. This is a story like that, though the girl’s name is not Rose, and the train is not going to Toronto. But the feeling is the same: the feeling of a life teetering on a single, strange choice.

Clara felt a strange, slippery thing happening inside her. It wasn’t desire—not exactly. It was curiosity, but a dangerous kind. The kind that makes you want to touch a hot stove just to see if it really burns.