Soon we’re above the tree line. Bright purple flowers scatter the Alpine tundra below.

“I love it here,” I say.

“Me, too,” Curtis says. “I used to ride here with my sister.”

I force a smile. He hardly mentions her these days and I never know whether he thinks of her much or not.

A second cable car takes us to the summer ski area on the glacier. It’s a full twenty degrees colder by the time we step out. I glance into the operator booth as we pass it and a scarily familiar set of blue eyes looks back at me. Goose bumps come up on my arms.

But it’s only Curtis’s reflection.

Stupid. I should be used to this by now because I see her or Odette at least once every day we’re up here. It’s the price I pay for having a guilty conscience.

Curtis didn’t tell his mum what he learned about Saskia’s final hours. How could he? Instead, after much debate, he handed her Saskia’s lift pass, found (he claimed) by a Le Rocher local out hiking recently, as proof she was training up there on the day she disappeared. That her death, though untimely, was an accident from doing what she loved.

The lift pass, now neatly framed, looks out from the wall at his parents’ place, amid a gallery of photos of her. A dozen sets of blue eyes watching us, every time we go around for dinner.

Curtis reaches for my hand as we walk across the ice to the snow park. He shakes his head at the state of the snow cover. “If we lose any more there’ll be none left.”

Glaciers across the Alps have suffered record retreats this year, thanks to global warming.

Coaching doesn’t begin until ten a.m., but two of the girls are already at the snow park, warming up.

“They’re keen,” Curtis says.

I smile. “I know.”

Coaching has given me a new purpose in life. Perhaps I can help others achieve what I couldn’t achieve for myself. And these two girls—my girls—have everything going for them. They’re young, they’re fit, and they have that killer instinct, the will to win above all else.

A rush of nostalgia sweeps over me as I watch them. My competition days are over but theirs are just beginning.

Jodie hoists her foot onto the rope barrier to stretch her hamstrings. And Suzette . . . What is Suzette doing? She’s crouching over her board, rubbing something onto the base. There’s something furtive about the way she’s doing it. She catches my eye and slips whatever it was back in her pocket. It wasn’t snowboard wax, that’s for sure.

And when she props the snowboard against the other one and joins Jodie at the rope, I realize something else.

That wasn’t her snowboard.