Nine months pregnant, I was pushed from an icy cliff by the husband who wanted my $50 million life insurance payout. Now he stands at the funeral they believe is mine, smiling beside his secret lover like he has already won. They think I’m gone… but I’m still alive, barely holding on, and coming back to make him pay.

In late June, the high country finally opened.

The snowplows of the National Park Service had spent six weeks cutting through thirty-foot drifts along Trail Ridge Road, clearing the highway to the alpine tundra so that the summer tourists could look out over the vast, green sweep of the continental divide.

It was ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning.

The air at eleven thousand feet was thin, sharp as cold cider, smelling of sun-warmed granite, dwarf clover, and the resinous pitch of the stunted bristlecone pines that had clung to the rock faces since the time of the Roman Empire.

A black Range Rover—my own vehicle now, purchased from the federal receiver with an unencumbered corporate check—sat parked at the Many Parks Curve turnout.

I stood by the low stone retaining wall.

I did not have the cane.

The carbon-fiber brace was gone, replaced by a simple elastic compression wrap beneath my heavy hiking trousers. My left leg was strong, rebuilt by five months of physical therapy and four miles of daily walking along the high ditch trails behind Boulder.

Beside me stood Thomas, wearing his old field jacket, holding an aluminum thermos of hot coffee.

And between us, secured in a front-facing mountain carrier strapped against my chest, was Leo.

He was eight months old today.

He was twelve pounds heavier than the night he was pulled from the aluminum floor of the AW139, wearing a fleece bear suit with ears on the hood, his bright blue eyes wide with fascination as a mountain bluebird fluttered down from a rock ledge, landing on the gravel three feet from my boots.

Leo reached out with both hands, his fingers opening and closing, letting out a sharp, joyous crow that echoed against the sheer rock face of the overlook.

"Look at that, Leo," I murmured, leaning my forearms against the warm stone of the wall. "That’s your mountain."

I looked down over the lip.

Eighty feet below, the shelf of black shale was clear of snow.

The dwarf juniper bushes were still there—gnarled, twisted, ancient, their gray roots anchored into the horizontal cracks of the gneiss like iron staples holding a broken plate together.

In the center of the shelf, where my body had rested while the squall lines beat the dark into foam, a small cluster of yellow alpine sunflowers—Rydbergia grandiflora—had bloomed through the frozen moss, their golden faces turned straight up into the noon sun.

Thomas poured two fingers of coffee into the plastic thermos cup and handed it to me.

"The Cody grand jury returned the capital indictment this morning, Sarah," Thomas said, his gray eyes looking out over the blue, hazy vastness of Forest Canyon. "The extradition papers were signed by the governor at nine AM. Michael will be transferred to the Park County jail for trial in September."

I took a slow sip of the coffee. It was hot, bitter, and clean.

"And the firm?"

"The second-quarter numbers cleared the Denver clearinghouse yesterday," Thomas smiled. "Operating margin is up twenty-two percent. The drivers in Grand Junction voted unanimously to name the new regional terminal after Arthur."

I looked down at the gold watch on my wrist.

It was ten-fourteen.

The exact minute, eight months ago, when Michael had looked down from this stone rail, smiled his beautiful, professional smile, and told me that I wouldn't suffer long.

He had been wrong about the suffering.

Suffering is not a falling down; it is a staying awake. It is the counting of breaths when the ribs are cracked; it is the holding of an unborn child against the frost until the steel cable drops through the white air; it is the patient, surgical dismantling of a lie until nothing remains of the man who told it except an eight-digit inmate number in an underground cell.

A gentle breeze came up from the gorge, warm with the scent of wild lupine and melting snow.

Leo kicked his legs against my ribs, his small head turning toward the bird, his laughter ringing out clear, loud, and triumphant over the canyon that had tried to claim his life.