For two hours on a frozen ledge, it had done everything the cold and the dark and the height could do to end us.

And it had failed, because a nine-months-pregnant woman had refused to stop breathing while her son was still fighting, and because a rescuer had come down out of the sky, and because a dead father’s caution had outlasted a living husband’s greed, and because the truth, in the end, does not stay buried under the snow.

I stood there in the warm sun with my living son laughing against my heart, and I understood the thing I had come back up the mountain to understand.

The mountain was never our grave.

It was only the place where we found out, once and for all, exactly how strong we truly were.

We went into the dark, my son and I, in the coldest hour of our lives — and we came back out of it, together, into the sun, and we won everything.