The moment five-year-old Grace stopped breathing, Ezra Calloway understood that the mountain was no longer simply delaying them.
It was trying to take his daughter.
One heartbeat earlier, Grace had been burning with fever against his chest, her small body trembling beneath the layers he had wrapped around her.
Then she went frighteningly still.
“Grace…”
Ezra shifted her in his arms and gently shook her shoulder.
“Baby, open your eyes. Come on. Look at Pa.”
Nothing.
The storm screamed around them, driving snow against Ezra’s face hard enough to sting, but for one terrible instant he barely heard it.
All he could hear was the absence of his daughter’s breathing.
Thomas, his eleven-year-old son, stood a few feet away with snow clinging to his coat and hair.
“Pa…”
His voice cracked.
“She ain’t…”
“Don’t say it.”
Ezra dropped to one knee in the snow and pressed his ear against Grace’s chest.
He listened.
Nothing.
His own heartbeat thundered so loudly that he feared he would miss whatever tiny sound might still be inside her.
He shifted his head and listened again.
Then he felt it.
A faint flutter.
So weak that for half a second he wondered whether desperation had created it.
Ezra held his breath.
There it was again.
“She’s alive,” he whispered.
His eyes burned, and the moisture on his face turned cold almost immediately.
“Lord help us… she’s still alive.”
That was all the hope he had.
A flutter beneath his ear.
Around them, the blizzard had swallowed nearly everything else.
The trail was gone beneath fresh snow. The mountains ahead and behind had disappeared into a white wall. Wind tore through the trees and erased their footprints almost as quickly as they made them.
Eight-year-old Micah stood close to his older brother, shaking so hard that his teeth clicked together.
“What do we do, Pa?”
Ezra looked at him.
Micah’s wide brown eyes were the eyes that always made Ezra think of Sarah.
His wife was gone now, buried before this journey ever began, and Ezra had spent every day since trying to become enough parent for three children when he barely felt like enough man for himself.
Now Grace was barely breathing in his arms, and both boys were turning pale from the cold.
Ezra forced himself to look toward the wagon.
Thomas was already moving.
The boy fought through snow that reached high on his legs and crouched beside the damaged wheel. His fingers moved over the axle and splintered wood with the seriousness of someone much older than eleven.
Ezra watched his oldest child inspect the break.
Thomas finally looked back.
Ezra knew the answer before the boy spoke.
“The wheel’s cracked clean through,” Thomas called over the wind. “We’re not going anywhere. Even if we could see, we’d need a blacksmith.”
Ezra closed his eyes for one second.
Millard’s Crossing was still fifteen miles away.
Fifteen miles.
On a clear day, with a sound wagon and healthy children, the distance would have been difficult but manageable.
Now it might as well have been on the other side of the world.
Grace needed help.
Thomas was exhausted.
Micah was freezing.
The wagon could no longer carry any of them.
And the mountain offered no mercy for the fact that Ezra was already grieving one person he loved.
Sarah… I’m failing them again.
The thought came before he could stop it.
He pulled Grace tighter against his chest.
Her face felt terribly hot compared with the frozen air, yet she did not wake when he adjusted her.
Ezra stared into the blowing snow.
There were no good choices left.
Only choices that might kill them slowly and one choice that might give them a chance.
