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""The last thing I saw before Preston shoved me was his wedding ring flashing beneath the gray winter sun.
My boots slid sideways on the ice, and for one stupid second I reached for him because twelve years of loving someone had trained my body to expect his hand.
He stepped back instead.
“Preston.”
His face had gone strangely calm.
Behind him, Vanessa Mercer stood beside our rented SUV with both hands pressed over her mouth, though nothing about her eyes looked surprised.
Then Preston put his palm against my shoulder and pushed again.
I went over Ravenstone Cliff nine months pregnant with his son.
The scream barely made it out of me before the wind tore it apart.
I struck something hard enough to turn the world black.
When consciousness returned, snow was falling onto my eyelashes.
I was lying on a narrow shelf of rock perhaps thirty feet below the rim, twisted partly onto my left side.
My wrist sat at an angle that made me look away.
Every breath scraped beneath my ribs.
I did not care about any of it until I realized I could not feel the baby moving.
“No.”
The word came out as vapor.
I dragged my good hand across my coat and pressed it against the enormous curve of my stomach.
“Eli.”
Preston hated the name, which was one reason I had begun privately calling our son that.
“Come on, sweetheart.”
Nothing happened.
Above me, boots scraped against ice.
I stopped breathing.
Vanessa’s voice drifted over the edge.
“Can you see her?”
“No.”
“You said this would be quick.”
“It was quick.”
“She screamed.”
“We’re on a mountain, Vanessa.”
Her answer disappeared beneath the wind.
Then Preston laughed.
It was not the theatrical laugh of a monster.
That would have been easier to understand.
It was the irritated little laugh he used when a waiter brought the wrong wine or somebody ahead of him took too long at an ATM.
“For fifty million dollars,” he said, “she’d better be dead.”
Something inside my coat vibrated.
My phone.
The sound seemed impossibly loud.
I shoved my good hand toward the pocket, but my swollen belly and broken wrist trapped me awkwardly against the rock.
Above me, Preston went silent.
“Did you hear that?”
Vanessa answered too quickly.
“Hear what?”
I forced my face into the snow and held still.
A few seconds later, loose ice scattered over the ledge as Preston approached the rim.
I could picture his polished hiking boots, purchased three days earlier because he had complained that my old maternity boots embarrassed him.
Another piece of ice struck my cheek.
Then his footsteps retreated.
A car door slammed.
Another followed.
An engine started.
I waited until the sound vanished before I moved.
My phone had stopped vibrating.
Getting it out took nearly ten minutes.
The screen was cracked, and the cold had reduced the battery to three percent.
There was no service.
I laughed once.
The sound frightened me.
I was sitting on a cliff with blood freezing against my cheek, and apparently my response to a useless phone was laughter.
My mother used to do that.
She laughed at funerals, power outages, flat tires, and once during my high-school principal’s furious lecture about a chemistry-lab fire I had not actually started.
“Your nervous system has terrible manners,” she had told me afterward.
Thinking of her made the laughter stop.
She had been dead eleven months.
The grief still arrived without knocking.
I put the phone inside my bra to keep the battery warm and returned my hand to my stomach.
“Eli, your grandmother would be extremely annoyed with both of us right now.”
A faint pressure touched my palm.
I froze.
There it was again.
Not a kick.
More like the slow push of a heel.
I started crying so hard that my ribs punished me for it.
“Okay.”
I wiped my nose with my glove.
“Okay, we’re not doing that anymore.”
The next hour became a collection of small negotiations.
Stay awake for another minute.
Move two fingers.
Breathe without screaming.
Do not look over the edge.
Do not imagine Preston drinking bourbon beside a fireplace while waiting for somebody to find my body.
That last instruction failed repeatedly.
The strangest part was that I had known something was wrong before the trip.
Not murder wrong.
Marriage wrong.
Preston had spent months becoming careful around me.
Careful was worse than cruel because cruelty left fingerprints.
Careful meant changing his phone password and then acting wounded when I noticed.
It meant asking three separate times whether my life insurance remained active after I left my job.
It meant insisting on this ridiculous mountain getaway ten days before my due date because, according to him, we needed “one final weekend as ourselves.”
I had almost canceled that morning.
Then he made pancakes.
Preston never made pancakes.
He burned the first batch and cursed at the smoke detector while I sat at the kitchen island laughing.
For twenty minutes, he had seemed like the man I married.
That memory hurt worse than my wrist.
By the time the light began fading, I could no longer feel my feet.
I heard the helicopter before I saw it.
At first I assumed my mind had manufactured the noise.
Then a white beam crossed the mountain and disappeared.
I tried to shout.
My chest produced a weak rasp.
The beam returned.
This time it stopped.
I lifted my unbroken arm.
The helicopter circled while someone descended toward the ledge on a rescue line.
The man who reached me was not wearing the bright jacket I expected.
He wore black beneath the harness, and silver hair showed beneath his helmet.
He crouched without touching me.
“Madison?”
Nobody on that mountain should have known my name.
I stared at him.
His face belonged to an old photograph I had found after my mother died.
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She had hidden it inside an envelope behind her marriage certificate.
The man in the photograph had been younger, dark-haired, almost smiling.
