“Well, as long as it’s fine,” she says.
“I’d like it,” I say, and from the corner of my eye I can see the skeptical look she shoots me. “Really. I would.”
“When are you coming back?” she asks. “Maybe we could—”
She cuts off mid-sentence because I brake hard, both of us leaning into our seatbelts, the pine tree air freshener swinging wildly from the rearview mirror. The truck slips a little, but this road isn’t nearly as bad as the one to the mining site, so disaster doesn’t strike this time.
Well. Not that kind of disaster, at least, but the road in front of us is… no longer a road.
“Uh,” Andi says. “Shit.”
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
ANDI
“Well,”Gideon says, and lets the word hang in cold, snowy silence for a while.
“Is this an avalanche?” I ask, after a bit, because I’m honestly not sure. I thought avalanches happened in, like, the Sierra Nevada or the Himalayas or something. The Blue Ridge mountains just don’t seem dire enough to have them.
“Yup,” he says. “Don’t go any closer, I don’t know if—”
“Gideon,” I say with exaggerated patience.
“I just don’t want you getting hurt,” he grumbles, after a minute, and of course I feel like an asshole.
The road’s gone, for a good fifty feet where it snakes through a hollow in the mountains, then picks up again on the other side. Where there should be road there’s a flat slope of snow, downed trees, rocks, and dirt, a big blank space on the side of the mountain, suddenly open to the sky. It’s short enough that I could easily walk over it, except walking on a recent avalanche is a terrible idea.
There’s no way the truck’s getting over it, and we’re still a bunch of miles from the Parkway.
“Any chance there’s another route?” I ask, though I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
“None I’m willing to take,” Gideon says. He takes his knit hat off, runs his hand through his hair, then puts it back. “If you want to hike out, there’s a couple trails we could take, then call for a ride once we’re at the bottom,” he says. “It’s a good ways, though. And we’d need an earlier start so we couldn’t start until tomorrow.”
I don’t miss the fact that he sayswe, but I also don’t bring it up. Of course, Gideon assumes that he’d be escorting me to safety on a bad ankle and thenhiking alone back to the cabin on that same bad ankle, and I’m not even going to acknowledge that.
“It’ll probably melt in a few days,” I say, because this is my first winter back in Virginia in a very long time, but isn’t that how it works here? It snows, and instead of dealing with it everyone just waits seventy-two hours for the snow to melt?
“I’m willing to bet the road’s out,” he says, still looking out at the mass of snow and debris, arms crossed. “Even once the snow melts, it’s gonna be…”
“Once the snow melts, we can go the back way,” I say, which elicits no reaction from Gideon. “The way you got to the mine site where you found me?”
“You mean the way where we already ran off the road once?”
“It was dark and actively blizzarding,” I point out.
“And in a few days it’ll be muddy and slippery or muddy and frozen over,” he says. “I wouldn’t go that route unless I really had to. Pretty dangerous for vehicles.”
Nowhe tells me, and there’s twist of guilt somewhere behind my ribcage.
“Oh,” I say. “Sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize more.”
“Did I apologize at all?”
“Only about twenty times that night,” he says. “And a couple times since then.”
I blow out a foggy breath toward the trees still over us and the sky above them. The avalanche tore a window through them, so even though we’re still standing in forest, it’s lighter than it would otherwise.
