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Her eyes snap back up to his. “I know.” She swallows, and then takes a step toward him. “But the choices we made ...”
“We make choices every day,” he points out, reminded of Miranda’s words to him in the hospital hallway. “Everyone does.” He waves his arm back into the lodge. “Spencer and Cameron did, and we lived the consequences for over two full nights of terror.”
She offers him a sad smile. “They’re just kids, Silas.”
“Wewere just kids,” he answers softly. “Some of our choices were very wrong, and some ...” He takes a chance, reaching for one of her hands. It’s red with cold. “Some were right, if only for a moment.” She looks down but makes no protest when he threads his fingers through hers. He can feel the pulse point of her wrist through his thumb.
“We’re not kids now,” she answers finally, like it’s her last card in a hand she’s determined to play. Her fingers curl around his.
“No,” he agrees, “we’re not.” And unlike so many years before, when he stood in the darkness of the woods and gave her every way out, this time he simplifies the equation. With a firm tug on her hand, he pulls her through the doorway. She brings with her tracks of snow that pool on the floor, and when he kisses her, the chill of her mouth sends a tremor down his spine. Her cheeks and nose and eyelids are wet with beaded water, her hair stiff with ice when he combs his fingers through it.
Her hands rise to the back of his neck, her cold fingertips digging in to the cotton of his shirt, and Silas closes the door behind her with a hefty kick, still kissing her. The warmth of the room melts the snowclinging to Meg’s coat and pants and the tips of her hair, and in the span of a minute Silas’s shirt is equally wet. When he releases her, her smile is everything he remembers it to be: the startle of happy surprise laid bare and breathless. He peels away her coat, letting it fall in a puddle on the rug, and resumes kissing her until the vibration of her laugh tickles his lips.
They talk into the night, and as their touches become softer, the questions become harder. He tells her about his years away, they compare their long-overdue interviews with Walters, and she recounts the past decade-plus in Feather River and search and rescue. They indulge in hindsight: how Danny’s reluctance to participate in Meg’s determination to reopen Jessica’s case now adds up, how Silas’s return to the lodge may have been a subconscious attempt at finally making things right. As they talk, Silas studies the pale hue of Meg’s complexion in the firelight and wonders that she doesn’t bruise more easily. The search for his sons will haunt him forever, and Jessica Howard will haunt him forever; perhaps being with this woman will feel akin to living with a ghost.
Tonight, however, she’s flesh and blood, capable, as always, of both redemption and transgression. She smiles at him again, and this time it’s somehow Meg at eighteenandMeg at thirty-three. Now that they’ve filled in a few lines of their story, Silas can see the depth fifteen years of shading will bring. For the first time he doesn’t feel the need to scale mountains, and outrun the competition, and beat the odds. There’s no single pin to place to mark where they went wrong or where they’re going, so he stops looking.
The snow falls outside the window until dawn, and when he wakes to fresh powder reaching the sill, Silas knows what he told Meg is true. Their lives didn’t irrevocably change after one impulsive choice that August night, even if Jessica’s had. One decision—to go, to stay, to run, to tell—built upon the next, until minutes became hours, and hours became days, falling like snow to cover the earth, burying the good and the bad.
