Right now, all you have to do is hold on to me.” And he braced himself against the rock, and held me against his chest, and gave the signal, and we rose up off that ledge into the storm.

As we lifted, I looked down one last time at the place where I was supposed to die.

Brandon believed he had buried his secret under the Montana snow.

He had no idea it was rising into the air, alive, in a rescue harness, coming back for him.

I learned later how the rescue had even come to happen, and it deepened, for me, the strange grace of the whole thing.

The very storm that Brandon had counted on to erase me — the blizzard that was supposed to bury my body past all finding — was the reason the alpine team was in the mountains at all.