Mile ninety-eight hit different than the others.
Not harder, exactly. Just more honest. The accumulated miles had stripped away everything that wasn’t essential—the race strategy, the carefully managed pace, the mental calculations Steph had been running since the race started.
What was left was simple. Keep moving. One foot in front of the other. The finish line existed, and she was going to reach it.
Thirty-eight hours and some change were behind her. The cutoff was fifty-five hours, but her personal goal was forty. She was going to make it with time to spare.
The course had done everything it promised. Subzero temperatures, the wind finding every gap in her layers and working at it patiently. A section where the snow went from fast and firm to the soft, soul-sucking kind. Two aid stations so far apart they barely counted, the miles between them the longest she’d run in her life.
She’d kept moving through all of it.
The sled had performed. The harness had held. The food she’d tucked against her body had stayed soft enough to eat, and the stove had worked at elevation the way she’d tested it in the meadow on a training run back in January, which now felt both like a different life and like yesterday.
Even after the terror in December, Steph knew she needed to continue her training plans. If she hadn’t, she might have become forever fearful of being alone in thewilderness at night, and then how could she be expected to finish her race?
Brooke and Gina understood her need and offered to go with her, even though neither of them were fans of winter excursions. It had been exactly what she needed, not only to prove to herself that she could still do it, but also to show just how good of friends they were, not that she ever doubted that.
She’d tightened her gear then, too, making sure she had everything that was mandatory along with anything she might need just in case. Surviving a night with Jack while being shot at had really driven home how badly things could go wrong.
The finish line was visible now, the banners and the lights and the small cluster of people who had come out in the March cold to wait for finishers. She recognized the configuration from the two previous years she’d been there, the first as a DNF and the second as a barely-made-it, and she understood this year was different before she could see any faces clearly.
Jocelyn’s voice carried through the air, shouting Steph’s name.
That was always how it was. Jocelyn’s voice carried the way voices did when their owner had spent years projecting to the back of a theater, and the particular pitch she reserved for moments of genuine excitement was unmistakable at this distance. Steph picked it out of the cold air, and a knot inside her slowly unraveled.
Then she could see them.
Jocelyn with both arms in the air, not caring even slightly about the cold or the spectacle she was making of herself, which was pure Jocelyn and exactly right.
Joe Monroe stood beside her, more restrained but present, his hands coming together, watching her come inwith the expression of someone who understood what they were witnessing.
Brooke’s face bright with the joy she brought to other people’s victories, and Tyler with his arm around her shoulders and a grin that said he’d been waiting awhile and didn’t mind.
Gina and Nick farther along the chute, adding their voices to it.
And Jack.
He was easy to find. Bundled up well against the cold, he was the tallest of the group, and he was cheering the loudest, which she would not have predicted six months ago, and which now seemed completely right.
His voice carried over the others, not Jocelyn’s theatrical projection but something more unguarded than she’d heard from him in all the months she’d known him. He had his arms up and his eyes on her and he was not pretending to be composed about any of it.
She kept moving toward the finish line, eyes on him, and thought about everything it had taken to get here. Not just the hundred miles behind her, not just the hours of cold and dark and the particular suffering that The Frozen Divide delivered without apology.
The months before that.
The gear swap and the Jingle Run and the overnight training run that had turned into something neither of them had planned for. The crevice in the rock where they hid, side by side, shoulders touching. Even deep in the danger, Steph knew. She knew Jack wasn’t who she’d convinced herself he was.
Jack Swisher was so much more. And it was then she started having an inkling he was the one she wanted to spend her life with.
She thought about what she’d told herself for years. She was fine alone. Running and her career and the careful life she’d built could be enough without needing a man to be a part of it. Being alone wasn’t the issue as much as the clock, but she’d found a solution around that.
She’d been wrong about most of that.
Jack had become a part of her life, often joining the Wednesday running club and doing things with her group of friends. Steph, too, would go to Elkridge to participate in his club events.
Living thirty miles apart and both of them being busy meant they worked hard to find time to be together and spent hours each week on the phone getting to know each other.
And the more she learned about him and who he really was, the more she understood all of those years of wanting were paying off.
