He reached farther into the backpack. There was food. A water bottle that was now frozen. A Bunsen burner.
Then he pulled out a photograph. Four by six and creased at one corner.
Her breath caught when she recognized the image there.
Her family stared back at her.
The picture had been taken in their parents’ backyard. Mackenzie was maybe nineteen. She laughed at something off camera, her hair longer than Kori remembered. Kori herself was twenty-three, and she had an arm around her sister’s shoulders. Their parents looked at them in the background, grinning with pride at their daughters. Her mom held a homemade birthday cake—yellow with chocolate icing.
That was right . . . it had been Mackenzie’s birthday party. Family and friends had joined them for a cookout, cake, and a pool party.
The moment had been so happy, so perfect—though she hadn’t realized it at the time.
She sat with the picture, the weight of her loss pressing on her. The loss of her parents. The separation from Mackenzie. The fact her sister was now missing.
Life could change so quickly. Too quickly.
And there were no do-overs. No chances to go back and correct the things that had gone wrong. There was only making peace with decisions that had been made. Accepting them. Learning from them.
Wyatt said nothing. He simply gave her space.
Mackenzie had carried this photo. Through everything—through the choices and the falling out and the years of silence. She’d carried this picture at the bottom of her pack.
Kori pressed her lips together, fighting tears.
Not now. Not here. She had to hold herself together.
There was more at stake here than her grief.
She looked up and saw Wyatt scanning the wilderness around them. Thunder had gone still beside him, but his nose worked the air and his ears rotated slightly as if sensing trouble.
Then Wyatt crouched and studied the snow to their right.
Kori followed his gaze and saw the tracks stretching there.
Boot prints had been left in the snow between the trees, maybe twenty feet off the path. They were fresh, with sharp, clean edges.
Those tracks hadn’t been there on the way in. Wyatt would have seen them.
Had another hiker come this way behind them and then turned back? Or were these tracks from the person who’d been hiding nearby earlier?
Fear rushed through her.
Wyatt kept his voice low as he said, “Someone’s been moving parallel to us.”
Something cold shifted in her chest. Was this person somehow associated with Mackenzie? Had this man—Kori assumed it was a man—stalked Mackenzie while on her hike?
She must have been so scared . . .
A sob caught in her throat.
“We need to keep moving,” Wyatt murmured.
Two things were true at once: Kori wanted to get out of this forest. But she also wanted to stay and find her sister.
Wyatt watched everything around them as they hiked back.
He studied the shadows where the light didn’t reach—anywhere someone could hide and watch without being seen.
