She stopped and turned, waved, called out, “Enjoy your meal!” Then she turned to face her sister, who cuffed her playfully across the temple.

And so Elsa and I sat drinking Riesling, toasting the New Year in, eating Swiss fondue from long skewers as we held hands under the table. We did not see the blackening sky. We were happy in each other’s company, easy in the warmth of the wine, and of the food, and of the fires in the grates.

That first gust. A metallic shriek, not easily forgotten.

We were on our feet, outside before we knew it, looking up.

Heavy sheets of rain beat down across the slopes, freezing as they hit the snow. Clouds curdled across the mountainside. Chairs swung in the lifts.

I ran up the slope, skis in hand, tried to make my way through the barrier.

“Lift’s closed,” said the man in the booth.

“It’s still turning.”

“For people heading down. You can’t go up.”

“My daughters,” I said.

“Give a description to Mountain Rescue.”

An hour Elsa and I stood in the doorway to the restaurant, wet through, waiting for our daughters, each hiding our fear from the other. I pleaded with a god I did not believe in to return them to us, safe and unharmed. Vee was so small and Licia so naive. How stupid we had been to allow them to go.

And then they were there in front of us, laughing, high on the electric excitement of danger, wrapping themselves into us as we held them close.

“It’s her fault,” Vee was saying. “She made me not take my skis off. I must have fallen like fifty times.”

“Dad, she snuck onto the lift again.”

“Liar! You frickin’ dared me!”

I said, “I thought all the upper lifts were closed.”

Vee gave her sister a conspiratorial look. “Not if you know what you’re doing. And you didn’t have to come with me the second time, Licia. Or the third.”

Licia turned to me. “Dad, you might want to think about having my sister baptized. For her own safety. Before something bad happens.”

Whistler had become part of the lore of our family. A disaster averted. A narrative of sisterly heroism.

“Cal, this is nothing like Whistler,” Elsa was saying, quiet as breath.

I tried to take her hand. She tried to take mine.

We could not do it; we could not touch. And when I looked around us I saw that the other parents stood as we stood, holding papers with their children’s details on them, undone by nerves, separate and alone, eyes fixed on the island across the water where something had happened, some dread thing for which we did not yet have a name.