second, under a collapsed hunting blind with her backpack under her head.
Snowmelt dripped steadily through the branches.
Her feet blistered inside the boots.
Hunger hollowed her until she felt made of paper.
On the third evening, rain began.
It turned the slopes slick and the old snow to glass.
Liora tried crossing a washout where brown water ran fast between stones.
Halfway across, her boot slipped.
She dropped hard to one knee, catching herself on a root.
The backpack swung forward, the weakened strap tearing with a wet snap.
Everything spilled.
The jar of peanut butter hit a rock, bounced once, and vanished into the water.
One shirt followed.
Then the other.
The grocery receipt with her money tucked inside slid from a pocket and disappeared beneath the current.
‘No,’ Liora whispered.
She scrambled down the bank, plunging both hands into the freezing water, catching only leaves, mud, and a torn strip of cloth.
Then she remembered the clinic paper.
She tore through the soaked remains of the backpack.
The back pocket was empty.
For a moment, the entire forest seemed to hold its breath.
Liora sank to her knees in the mud.
The paper had been just paper.
It did not make the baby more real.
It did not make her more deserving.
But it had been proof.
Proof that someone had heard what she had heard.
Proof that the heartbeat existed outside her own frightened body.
Now even that was gone.
The baby moved just after dawn.
Not a dramatic kick.
Not pain.
A small shifting pressure beneath her palm, like a fish turning in dark water.
Liora opened her eyes under a cedar tree and laughed once, breathlessly, because she had not died in the night and neither had the baby.
‘All right,’ she whispered.
‘I hear you.’
She walked higher.
By noon, the forest changed.
The trees grew older and farther apart.
Mist hung between their trunks.
The logging road faded to two muddy tracks, then to nothing.
Liora’s fever had begun by then; she knew because the air felt both freezing and hot against her skin.
Her thoughts slipped and repeated.
Keep moving.
Find shelter.
Do not fall.
Then she smelled smoke.
She stopped so suddenly her knees nearly buckled.
Smoke meant a fire.
Fire meant warmth.
Warmth meant people.
People meant risk.
Boyd knew every deputy in the county.
Maren knew how to cry convincingly.
Liora could already imagine the story they would tell: unstable niece, teenage mistake, ran off in shame, family desperate to bring her home.
But the baby shifted again.
The choice became simple.
She followed the smoke through the trees to a narrow ravine.
There, half-hidden beneath cedar boughs, stood a small cabin with a mossy tin roof and a stone chimney.
It looked too carefully kept to be abandoned.
Firewood stood in exact rows beneath the porch overhang.
A blue enamel pot rested upside down near the door.
A pair of rubber boots sat on the mat, one leaning slightly against the other.
Liora climbed the porch steps.
She raised her hand to knock.
The door opened.
An old woman stood on the threshold with a shotgun angled toward the floor.
She was tall but thin, her white hair braided over one shoulder, her face lined by weather
