They had been deployed for other stranded hikers, driven up into the high country by exactly the weather my husband had chosen as his accomplice.

The storm he weaponized against me was the storm that saved me.

And when a sensor on their equipment picked up a heat signature on a ledge where no living thing should have been, in conditions where no one could survive for long, they came, not because anyone had reported me missing — no one had; Brandon had made sure of that — but because they were the kind of people who go down a cable into a blizzard on the chance that the impossible heat signature is a person still breathing.

I owe my life to strangers who did not know my name, who had no reason to expect anyone alive on that cliff, and who came anyway.

I think about them when the world feels cruel.

For every Brandon, calculating in the warmth of a car, there is a Samuel, going down into the storm on a maybe.