Chapter 132
Two weeks passed, and Charlotte made three deliveries.
The first was a short run to a settlement northeast of the cabin, where she delivered medical supplies and intelligence from radio intercepts near Boulder.
She accepted a letter in return and tucked it into her pack with the care that had become a habit.
The family who hosted her that night asked about the mail carrier stories they’d heard, and Charlotte answered with the modest deflection of someone who still couldn’t quite believe the journey belonged to her.
The second delivery took her west toward the divide.
She traveled with Derek, a former ranger who knew the mountains well.
They moved quickly, delivered their packets to a resistance outpost in an abandoned ski hut, and made it back on the third day, cold and tired, carrying two new letters for the network.
Through all of it, Charlotte thought about Sophia in the quiet moments, setting up camp, filtering water, watching the horizon for movement that shouldn’t be there.
Sophia was capable. Rose was experienced.
The route was within the network’s secured corridor.
None of that stopped her from checking the cabin’s radio each evening for any mention of her daughter’s name.
The third delivery brought her home. She had been gone four days on a loop south through the valley, and the return trail climbed toward the cabin with the relief of a journey ending where it was supposed to.
She crested the final ridge as the afternoon light faded, and the cabin came into view below her, smoke from the chimney, the garden behind the house, forest pressing close on all sides.
She expected to see Sophia. They should have returned, rested, and maybe gone out again.
Charlotte carried that expectation down the trail with the lightness that came from believing her family was whole and waiting.
The cabin was quiet when she entered. Evelyn was at the stove.
Mason was outside with Liam, their voices carrying through the open door.
Sophia wasn’t there. The room felt adjusted to an absence.
She set her pack by the door. “Hey,” she said to Evelyn. “Where’s Soph?”
“She’s not back yet,” Evelyn said. “The Georgetown run. They were due yesterday.”
“Yesterday.”
Evelyn nodded, her silence heavy with unspoken worries, leaving Charlotte with a sense of the cabin’s uneasy atmosphere before she even stepped inside.
Outside, she found Liam and Mason by the woodpile.
When Liam looked up at her, there was a moment of understanding in his eyes before he set his tool aside, as if he sensed the weight of the moment too.
“They’re overdue,” Charlotte said.
Liam nodded. “The Georgetown settlement confirmed receipt. They left there four days ago on schedule. Nothing since.”
“Radio?”
“Silent. Both their units and the settlement’s repeaters. Could be equipment. Could be terrain. I sent Derek this morning. He knows the route. He’ll check the fallback positions, then continue to Georgetown if he doesn’t find them.”
Derek had already been sent, which meant the concern had been building while she was walking ridgelines and delivering medical supplies.
The timeline settled into place. Sophia and Rose had reached Georgetown.
They had left on schedule. Then nothing.
Four days of silence from a route that should have taken three.
“You should have radioed me,” Charlotte said.
The frustration in her voice wasn’t really about Liam. It came from the pain of the situation, the weight of the geography, and the relentless war that had already taken so much and felt poised to take more. It was a heavy burden, and she could feel her anguish echoing in every word.
“You were two days out on the divide run,” Liam said. “The radio wouldn’t have reached that far, and you needed to finish the delivery.”
Charlotte understood that he was right. The deliveries were crucial, and the network was vital to their work.
She knew that if she walked off her route because her daughter was late, it wouldn’t help anyone, especially not Sophia, who longed to be seen as a capable carrier rather than just a child who needed her mother to drop everything at the first sign of trouble.
From beside the woodpile, Mason watched them with a careful, attentive expression.
He had learned to read every situation since the shoreline, and that moment was no different.
At his feet, Jack sat quietly, ears alert, sensing the subtle shift in the surrounding atmosphere.
It was a moment filled with understanding and the weight of both responsibility and love.
“We’ll find them,” Liam said.
It was the closest thing to a promise he would offer, and they both understood its limits.
The mountains were vast. War was indiscriminate.
Finding two people in that landscape, with radios silent and the timeline already stretched, was the kind of work that began with hope and continued with discipline. It guaranteed nothing.
Charlotte looked at the trail where Sophia had walked out, confident, capable, and sixteen in a world that had stopped making allowances for age.
The trees were motionless in the fading light.
Somewhere beyond them, on a route her daughter had mapped and walked with a partner she trusted, silence had accumulated for four days, and the weight of it settled over the cabin with the same finality as night.