Four in the morning in Fort Collins is its own small country: nothing moving on Oak Street, the trees around Library Park holding their snow, everything quiet enough that you can hear a scrape a block away. Nica works those hours, plowing driveways and cutting walkways open while the town sleeps straight through it. Ice melt goes on the steps and the shaded stretch of sidewalk, because that is where people actually go down. By sunrise the drives are dark and wet and the whole storm feels smaller than it did at midnight. Quiet work, done early, for a town that will never quite know how early.