The doctors catalogued the damage: three fractured ribs, a broken cheekbone, a severe concussion, extensive bruising, and stage-one hypothermia.

I had come very close, they told me later, to not waking up at all.

The cold had nearly done what my parents had left it to do.

But I had woken up.

I was alive.

And somewhere in the fog of those first hours, beneath the pain and the disbelief, a single hard resolve was already forming: that I was not going to let them write the ending of this story.

Whatever it took.