EPILOGUE
CORY
ONE YEAR LATER
My daughter is three hours old and she already has her mother's grip.
Winter Rose Matthews came into the world at four seventeen in the morning on a Tuesday in January, screaming with a fury that rattled the windows of the Billings hospital room and made two nurses exchange a look that clearly communicated "this one's going to be trouble."
She's right. She is going to be trouble. She's got Shelby's blue eyes and my stubbornness and a set of lungs that could signal across a mountain valley without a radio.
I'm holding her in the rocking chair beside Shelby's bed, which is the only piece of furniture in this room that feels remotely adequate for the magnitude of what just happened.My daughter. Those two words rearrange the architecture of my entire existence every time they cross my mind.
Shelby is sleeping. Finally. Fourteen hours of labor, no epidural because my wife is a goddamn warrior who decided she wanted to feel everything, and she handled it the way she handles all adversity: with jaw-clenched determination, creative profanity, and a grip on my hand that I'm fairly certain left permanent marks.
I look at her. Strawberry blonde hair dark with sweat and fanned across the hospital pillow. Face pale and exhausted and so beautiful it makes my chest physically ache. The magazine on the bedside table, Altitude's May issue from last year, is dog-eared and coffee-stained and still open to page forty-seven: "The Man Behind the Mountain: Inside America's Most Rigorous Wilderness Survival School." Her byline. Her photos. The article that put Mountain Ready on the national map and tripled our enrollment overnight.
The article that brought her to me.
Winter shifts in my arms. Makes a sound that's half squeak, half growl, and opens those blue eyes to stare at me with the unfocused intensity of a brand-new human trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
"Hey, wildflower," I murmur. The nickname landed in my head the second they put her on Shelby's chest and she reached up with one tiny fist and grabbed a strand of her mother's hair and held on like she'd found the only thing in the universe worth gripping.
Like mother, like daughter.
The door opens quietly. Logan Creed leans in with two coffees and the expression of a man who has done this three times and still hasn't recovered from any of them.
"She's perfect," he says, keeping his voice low.
"She's loud."
"The good ones are." He hands me a coffee. Looks at Shelby sleeping. Looks back at Winter. "Lucy is going to lose her mind. She's been planning Winter's wardrobe since the baby shower. I think she bought her a dinosaur onesie."
"Of course she did."
Logan sits on the window ledge. The Billings skyline is waking up behind him, gray and cold and ordinary. Nothing like the mountain. But the mountain will be there when we go home.
Home. The word used to mean a cabin at nine thousand feet with a woodstove and a root cellar and enough isolation to keep the noise at bay. It still means those things. It also means the woman sleeping in that bed and the baby in my arms and the cabin we expanded last summer to include a nursery with windows facing east so Winter would wake up to the sunrise over the ridge.
Shelby designed the nursery. She has opinions about light and space and the way a room should feel when you walk into it, opinions formed from a lifetime of walking into temporary rooms and knowing immediately whether they were worth staying in. Our daughter's room has pale pine walls, a handmade crib that Logan helped me build, and a shelf already lined with children's books that Shelby started collecting the day she saw the positive test.
That day. I close my eyes and let the memory play.
We were on the upper observation point. She'd been sick for three mornings in a row and blamed it on a batch of elk jerky she swore was undercooked. I knew. I knew before she did, because I read her body the way I read weather systems, and her body was telling me something had changed. She took the test at the lodge and came out onto the porch where I was sitting and held up the stick and her hand was shaking and she said, "Apparently I'm staying for at least eighteen more years."
I stood up and I pulled her into my arms and I said, "You're staying forever. The eighteen years is just a starting point."
She cried. The good kind. The kind that comes from being handed something you didn't know you were allowed to want.
We got married six weeks later. Small ceremony on the observation point at Mountain Ready, the same rock ledge where she photographed the storm and I told her that smiling at things that could kill you isn't survival. Sawyer McKenna performed the ceremony, because apparently small-town sheriffs can do that in Montana. Logan stood as my best man. Erica stood for Shelby, because in the year since Shelby walked into Grizzly Ridge, Erica Clarke has become the sister she never had.
The whole community came. Maggie catered. Tuck handled logistics. Nash Carter showed up, which shocked everyone including Nash. Wren, his wife, told me later that Nash had said "If Matthews found someone willing to put up with him, I should at least witness it."
Even Cal Hayes sent a gift. A first-edition field guide to North American survival techniques, inscribed in Cal's precise handwriting:For the man who taught me that holding the line sometimes means letting someone in. Hold the line, brother.
I still have that book on the shelf above my desk.
Winter yawns. Her entire face compresses around the expression and she looks so much like Shelby in that moment that my heart does something it was not designed to do.
