Chapter 4 - The Light
Time on that ledge did not move like time anywhere else. Minutes stretched until they felt like separate lives. The cold crept under my clothes, into my bones, behind my eyes. Sometimes I heard the baby. Sometimes I imagined I did. I kept one hand on my stomach and forced myself to speak because silence felt too much like surrender.
“You’re going to meet me,” I whispered. “You hear me? You’re going to meet me.”
My phone was gone. My gloves were torn. The snow began filling the folds of my dress and cardigan, soft and deadly. I tried to drag myself closer to the rock wall, but pain flashed through me and I nearly slipped. After that, I stopped moving unless I had to breathe.
Then the mountain changed.
A beam of light swept through the snow.
At first, I thought it was the sun breaking through the storm, but the light moved too deliberately. Then came the sound: helicopter blades, distant and growing, louder than wind, louder than fear. Snow lifted around me in a wild spiral as the aircraft hovered beyond the cliff.
I cried then, not because I was safe, but because my body finally believed someone might know I existed.
The rope dropped. The rescuer descended. And when he removed his goggles, I saw a face I had only seen once before in an old photograph hidden in my mother’s cedar box.
Silver hair. Blue eyes. A scar near his jaw.
My mother had never told me his name. She only said some people disappeared because staying would get everyone killed.
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Now that man was kneeling beside me on a cliff ledge, saying my name like it had been a prayer.
“Emma,” he said again, voice breaking. “I finally found you.”
