NINE MONTHS LATER

It’s that time of year again.

The time the glacier gives up bodies.

The ice is thawing faster than usual in the recent heat wave, so they’re predicting a higher-than-average yield. I’ve taken to checking online several times a day.

Now, of course, there are two particular bodies that I’m waiting for.

But just as a watched pot never boils, it seems a watched glacier never produces bodies. Not the ones I want, at any rate. So far this month we’ve had three climbers still roped together and what is thought to be the Austrian couple who went missing in 1999.

I cross my fingers and scroll down the screen. Nothing. No new bodies. The wait is killing me.

“Milla!”

Curtis’s voice. From the bedroom.

“Just a minute!” I delete the search history. No need for Curtis to see what I’ve been looking at. There’s something distinctly unromantic about knowing your girlfriend is checking for your sister’s body.

Needing to know for sure that she’s dead.

I don’t know if Curtis ever checks for it. I guess his family would be told soon enough if she turned up. I shut the laptop down and head to the bedroom.

Curtis lies on his back with his arms folded behind his head, sheets in a tangle around his waist. Sunlight streams through the open window onto his bare chest. It’s only seven but it’s warm already. A breeze tugs at my hair, carrying with it the scent of cut grass and a distant clang of cowbells. I love Switzerland in August.

“Come here,” Curtis says.

I remain in the doorway. “Is that an order?”

A slow smile spreads across his face. “Yeah, it’s an order.”

“What if I don’t?”

“I might have to make you.”

I approach the bed, intending to stay just out of reach, but he grabs my wrist with one large hand, draws back the sheets with his other hand, and hauls me down on top of him. The hard-packed muscles of his chest cushion the impact; his strong arms wrap around my back, pulling me tight. His body feels warm and solid beneath mine.

If he weren’t so physically fit, he might not be here with me right now. His strength allowed him to last the long minutes under the snow until I limped back up the slope, found the blood-streaked ice axe, and dug down to him.

He wasn’t breathing by the time I hauled him out. I performed CPR—lucky the gym made me do all those first-aid courses—and he started breathing again, but he was dangerously cold and he’d dislocated his shoulder in the slide.