The light vanished, and then returned, stronger, and held steady on the cliff face just below me.

And over the roar of the storm came a new sound — rotors.

A helicopter, hovering somewhere above the ridge, and a heavy cable dropping down through the blowing snow, and a figure in alpine rescue gear sliding down it and landing, on one knee, on my narrow ledge.

Someone had come.

Someone was actually, impossibly, real, and coming toward me across the ice.

“My baby,” I forced out, with the last of what I had.