We pass the garages where they keep the snowcats and test each door in turn, but they’re locked, all of them. The sheds, too. My senses prickle. Is Dale out here? Is anyone else? I check over my shoulder but nobody’s there.

My knee throbs. The wind is blowing the top layer of snow about, making it difficult to see where we’re treading.

Curtis slows.

“You’re quiet,” I say.

He stops. Turns. “Why did you come to me last night and not ten years ago?”

Oh God. But he has a right to ask. I strain for words. “I felt something for you back then that . . .” Shit, this is hard.

“I knew you felt something,” he says. “I felt something, too.”

I take a deep breath. “I couldn’t have mixed a relationship with you and taken my snowboarding where I wanted it to go.”

He takes that in. “Fair enough.”

“Could you?”

For a moment, the only sound is the roar of the wind. “I don’t know. I didn’t get a chance to find out.”

A tightness chokes my throat.

“What about now?” he says. “Can you mix me with your life now?”

I swallow. “I hope so. Can you mix me?”

He raises his goggles and gives me a look that just floors me. “Yes.”

If it wasn’t so cold, I’d be flushing. I can’t hold back my smile and neither can he.

He lowers his goggles. “Better get on with this,” he says gruffly.

We head on up the slope. I should tell him about me and Saskia, but what exactly can I say? How it started as a fucked-up, twisted attempt to attack her? I’ll have to explain how, for me at least, it changed into something else. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years, and I’m still trying to make sense of it.

I’d never met anyone like Saskia before and I probably never will again. Yeah, there was a lot wrong with her, but there was a lot to admire as well. Her strength of character and sheer balls. How she didn’t need to be liked; that in particular is what made me like her. Love her, even. In a way.

Was that why I kept going? Or was it purely a physical thing? Athletes like to push their bodies, to test what it feels like when we do new things. If something feels good, we keep doing it. And it felt good with her. Can I seriously tell her brother that?

“Crevasses.” Curtis’s voice snaps me out of the moment.

We head cautiously over. The dark rock faces of the peaks above look down on us as though they know something we don’t. Braced for what I might find, I peer into the first glassy chasm. Nothing. I let out my breath and hear Curtis do the same.