I forced myself up. I dragged myself up the remaining fourteen steps, entirely on my forearms and knees, crying out into the empty void of the house with every agonizing inch.
When I finally reached the top landing, I collapsed. My arms gave out, and I hit the floor hard. I lay there, panting, sweating profusely despite the freezing temperature of the house, staring at the ceiling beams.
Get up. Get up. I rolled onto my side and army-crawled down the hallway. I pulled myself into the office, using the doorframe for leverage. I yanked the top drawer of my heavy oak desk open. Papers went flying, pens clattered to the floor.
My fingers closed around the cold, hard plastic of the bright orange Garmin device.
I dragged myself to the large office window. The glass was freezing, already caked with two inches of driven snow. I pressed the device flat against the pane to get the clearest possible view of the sky through the raging whiteout, my thumb hovering over the recessed button under the protective flap.
I pushed the SOS button. I held it down for three seconds.
The screen illuminated. A small, loading icon spun.
Emergency Signal Sent. Acquiring Satellites…
I held my breath, the pain fading into the background as I stared at the tiny screen. If the storm was too thick, the signal wouldn’t breach the atmosphere.
Awaiting Response…
Then, the device beeped. A sharp, loud, digital chirp.
Message Received. Telluride Mountain Rescue Dispatched. Remain in place. I dropped the device. I collapsed against the wall beneath the window, my legs sprawling out in front of me. I was panting, sweating, bleeding, and praying to a God I hadn’t spoken to in years. The signal was out. But the storm was raging, the roads were closed, and the baby was coming. I was entirely at the mercy of the mountain, waiting in the freezing dark, wondering if the rescue would arrive before my body finally tore itself apart.
It took two agonizing, mind-shattering hours.
Two hours of waiting in the rapidly freezing cabin. Two hours of contractions so severe, so relentless, that I bit entirely through my own lower lip to keep from screaming into the empty, echoing house. The taste of my own blood mixed with the salt of my tears. I had stripped off my soaked leggings, wrapping myself in a decorative wool throw blanket I pulled off the office armchair, shivering violently as shock and cold began to set in.
I was drifting in and out of consciousness, hallucinating faces in the shadows of the room, when I finally saw it.
Through the frosted, snow-caked windowpane, cutting through the absolute, blinding whiteout conditions of the blizzard, came the rhythmic flash of red and blue emergency lights.
It wasn’t an ambulance. No wheeled vehicle, not even a heavy-duty truck with chains, could make it up the steep, unplowed mountain grade in three feet of fresh powder. As the lights drew closer, the floorboards of the cabin began to vibrate with a heavy, mechanical rumble.
It was a massive, tracked Snowcat belonging to the Telluride Mountain Rescue team—a monstrous, tank-like vehicle designed to groom ski slopes and rescue avalanche victims.
I tried to yell, to let them know I was upstairs, but my voice was a broken, useless rasp.
I heard the heavy, diesel engine idle outside. Then came the shouting, muffled by the wind. They were at the front door. I heard the handle jiggle. Then came the heavy pounding.
They quickly realized it was deadbolted.
“Breach it!” a voice yelled from outside.
A second later, the horrifying, splintering crunch of the heavy oak front door giving way echoed through the house. They had used a heavy breaching axe to smash through the lock housing. The door blasted open, and the freezing wind howled into the foyer, bringing a swarm of men with it.
There was a rush of heavy, snow-covered boots, the frantic squawk of EMS radios, and the sudden, overwhelming, beautiful presence of strangers filling my isolated sanctuary. Flashlights cut through the gloom.
“Upstairs! Blood trail on the stairs!” someone shouted.
Heavy footsteps pounded up the wooden steps. Two men wearing heavy, bright red Mountain Rescue parkas burst into the office. The lead paramedic, a massive man with a snow-crusted beard, took one look at me huddled in the bloody blanket, took in the agonizing, bearing-down position of my body, and immediately dropped to his knees beside me.
“We got you, mama. You’re safe,” he said, his voice incredibly calm, a stark, beautiful contrast to the chaos. He pressed a plastic oxygen mask to my face, the rush of pure O2 clearing the black edges from my vision. “My name is Dave. We’re getting you out of here right now.”
They didn’t have time to wait for a stretcher. They rolled me onto a rigid plastic backboard, strapped me down with heavy nylon belts, and carried me out of the office.
The journey down the stairs was a blur of shouting and blinding pain. They carried me out the shattered front door and directly into the blinding, freezing, shrieking storm. The wind whipped at my exposed skin like icy razors, but within seconds, they had hoisted me into the heated, metallic back cabin of the rumbling Snowcat.
The doors slammed shut, sealing out the storm. The interior was cramped, smelling strongly of diesel fuel, wet wool, and antiseptic. Dave and another paramedic, a woman named Sarah, immediately began tearing open sterile trauma kits.
“The roads are completely impassable. The plow got stuck two miles down,” the driver shouted over his shoulder. “It’s gonna take us an hour to get to the medical center!”
“She doesn’t have an hour!” Sarah yelled back, checking my vitals. She looked at me, her eyes wide but focused. “Clara, you are fully dilated. We are going to have to deliver this baby right here, right now, while we move.”
My son, Owen, was born forty-five minutes later.
He was delivered by two frantic, heroic paramedics in the back of a rumbling, violently shaking snow-tractor as it fought its way down a treacherous, invisible mountain road through three feet of driven snow. The pain of the final push was an explosion that shattered my consciousness into a million pieces, a blinding white light that consumed the cramped cabin.
And then, a sound pierced the heavy hum of the diesel engine.
A high-pitched, furious, perfect wail.
He arrived screaming with a furious, unyielding vitality that instantly shrank the entire universe—the blizzard, the cabin, the betrayal, the pain—down to the exact circumference of his tiny, heaving chest.
Sarah quickly suctioned his nose and mouth, clamped the cord, and wrapped him in a thermal foil blanket before placing his slick, warm body directly against my bare skin.
I wrapped my trembling arms around him. The roar of the engine drowned out the storm outside, but inside my heart, there was only a profound, deafening silence. For a long, breathless moment, as I felt his tiny heartbeat thrumming against mine, there was no betrayal. There was no Julian. There was no Victoria.
There was only the primal, earth-shattering shock of realizing that absolute, overwhelming love can violently kick the door down and save you, even when the rest of the world locks the deadbolts and leaves you for dead.
Dawn broke over the hospital skyline hours later. The storm had finally passed, leaving the mountain world buried in pristine, silent, glittering white.
I was sitting up in a warm, sterile hospital bed, an IV dripping fluids and antibiotics into my bruised arm. I was exhausted, hollowed out, but alive. I was watching Owen sleep peacefully in his clear plastic bassinet beside my bed, his tiny chest rising and falling in a perfect rhythm.
My cell phone, which the paramedics had grabbed from the kitchen counter and brought with me, was finally connected to the hospital’s Wi-Fi. It lay on the plastic bedside tray.
It chimed. A sharp, cheerful little ping.
I reached over, my muscles screaming in protest, and picked it up. It was a push notification from my banking app. An automated fraud alert.
$3,250.00 charged at Oceania Luxury Cruises, VIP Spa & Wellness Package. Please verify if this transaction is authorized.
I stared at the glowing pixels on the screen.
I didn’t cry. The burning, hysterical rage I expected to feel didn’t arrive, nor did the suffocating, weeping grief of a broken heart.
