EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS LATER
After I get the duffel bag out of storage, I leave it on my kitchen counter for three days before I can bring myself to open it.
Bambi watches me from the couch, her velvet muzzle resting on her paws, sighing as I take a sip of coffee and eye the counter for the hundredth time. She’s been back home for two months now, and some days I still can’t believe she is real. That any of this is real.
Part of me is still unconvinced I survived that river. That all six of us—the women who made it past Anvil—did.
Pam and I took that kayak and raced the river with the last of our adrenaline, rowing the two miles of whitewater after Splinter Ridge with sheer will before reaching the pullout, marked by a glinting sign that Macy promised we couldn’t miss.
It only took us thirty minutes, but it felt like so much longer, knowing every second mattered.
Knowing that everyone back on that tiny portage beach was clinging to life by a thread.
When we finally staggered onto shore, numb and shaking, we ran for the gas station at the edge of the highway—the same one Leo Marsden stumbled into seven years earlier.
I felt like I was watching the scene from outside my body as we burst through the door, begging the attendant to call 9-1-1, to send help up the river. All I could think of was the four women we’d left behind, bleeding out on the sand.
Don’t let it be too late, I repeated in my head for hours that night, stomach churning and preparing for the worst while Pam and I were transported and admitted to the nearest hospital. I knew as well as anybody that sometimes it was simply too late. That the worst could and did happen every day.
But this time, it wasn’t too late. This time, Life Flight and Search and Rescue brought in four women on the brink of death, then began to coax them back to life.
The past six months haven’t been easy. But little by little, I’ve been coaxing myself back to life, too.
The wound at my ribs has healed to a thick pink line. My nightmares are as persistent as ever. But so is the relief when I wake up with Bambi in my own bed, the one that holds the faint shape of Parker on his side of the old mattress.
My phone buzzes, and I know without looking that it’s the group chat.
Every morning, without fail, somebody checks in.
It’s Macy, this time. A selfie with a grin and the caption, Check it out! Chin 3.0. Sutures out tomorrow.
My eyes brim with tears. Three surgeries later, you can still see the line where the wire carved through her face, but the raised scars are flattening, fading. Her mouth isn’t a permanent grimace anymore. The skin is healthy again, pink and alive.
Deborah and Allie chime in simultaneously.
Allie with, Oh hell yes. That’s stunning. And not to one-up you, but I lifted my arms above my head today in PT. Then a laughing emoji. She told me yesterday that she’s planning to try in-vitro this fall. As soon as she gets the all-clear from her physical therapist.
Deborah says, You little spring chicken! Look how well you’re already healing!
I smile, my chest aching with love. Six months ago, we were strangers. Now they know me better than anyone.
I know all about trauma-bonding, so maybe things won’t stay this way forever. But I refuse to let anyone but us define the love and friendship that’s blossomed through this horrific ordeal. There’s no way to skirt around trauma. It either shuts you down, or it breaks you open. Sometimes, both.
I’m trying every day to let it break me open. Because I refuse to go back to the darkness—the deep cave I couldn’t leave for so long, even after Parker’s body did.
I sit down at the kitchen counter beside the duffel bag and type out my reply to Macy’s text. You look like a Kardashian, Mace. Face lift at twenty-three? Get it, girl.
I hesitate before I hit send. Too much? Then I shake my head and send it anyway.
There isn’t much that offends Macy. And Imani will laugh, even if she doesn’t reply.
Healing has been hardest on her, out of all of us.
Before the rafting trip, she’d been on the brink of divorce.
And in the months following what the media is calling “The Camas Creek Copycat”—which doesn’t really make sense, given that Leo planned both—Imani’s husband left her and their boys.
When Imani shared the news, Pam drove through the night to show up at her door the next morning. Just in time to take her to physical therapy.
I set my phone down and take another sip of coffee, eyeing the duffel again.
It was Parker’s “base camp” bag, as he called it.
It contains the more valuable gear that didn’t belong in the garage with the other larger items, like the mountain bike or the paddle board.
Inside are his most prized possessions. A carbon-fiber climbing helmet, a neatly rolled drysuit, a compact avalanche beacon with spare batteries taped to the back, and—wrapped carefully in a towel—his high-end GPS satellite communicator, which cost more than my first car.
He told me once—offhand, like it probably wouldn’t ever be necessary for me to remember—that he always kept paperwork in this bag, sealed in a dry pouch.
Old permits, copies of his ID, emergency contacts for all his friends.
“If something happens,” he’d say, tapping the zipper, “there’s probably something useful in here. ”
I still haven’t been able to bring myself to look.
Until today.
I pull the duffel toward me and take a deep breath.
Bambi yawns and gets up from the couch to lie at my feet, sighing as she rests her head on my slippers.
When I unzip the bag, the smell hits me first—synthetic fabric that’s been sealed up for two years, mixed with the ghost of his deodorant and something earthier.
Dirt, maybe, from the last trail he hiked.
Or chalk dust from his climbing shoes. And underneath all of that is something unmistakably Parker.
That particular combination of mountain air and sunscreen and the wool socks he insisted on wearing, even in summer, because they’re “wicked better.”
My eyes sting as I breathe it in—breathe him in—and the smell unlocks memories so visceral, it’s like he’s sitting right beside me at the kitchen counter.
And he is, I remind myself.
I still believe that, without a doubt. He’s here in this kitchen, in the thud of my heartbeat, and in the way I smile now whenever I see a hawk circling overhead.
Hi, Parker, I say every time, whether its flight path veers my direction or not.
At the bottom of the duffel, my fingers close on a thick waterproof pouch. I open it, hands shaking, and begin to leaf through the carefully folded papers, one by one.
I let my eyes linger on his handwriting, neat and left-slanting, the names of his family members and friends and their loved ones, the emergency contacts. His driver’s license and passport. Copies of permits, leaflets of places he wanted to return to.
And then, at the bottom of the stack, a folded sheet of paper, with one word penned on the outside flap: KAIA.
I set it down on the counter with trembling hands, staring.
And then, before I can talk myself out of it, I open it.
Bambi yawns and sits up, leaning her soft head against my knee while I read through streaming tears.
Kai, if you’re reading this, then something bad happened.
And if something bad happened … I just need you to know that I love you more than anything.
I love our life together, all of it. Even yesterday, when you made us binge all five Twilight movies and I said I was team Volturi (I’ll never admit it again, but I’m team Jacob).
“I fucking knew it,” I whisper, laughing and crying at the same time.
You’re my person, Kaia. And I want you to know that whatever happens when we die, I’m still going to love you.
You’re my soulmate. And that’s true even if we all just turn into dirt and stardust when we die.
But I don’t think we do. I feel like there’s too many beautiful and terrible things in this world for it not to be a little bit magic.
I sit on the floor with Bambi for a long time after I finish the note, feeling all the beautiful and terrible things.
Like soulmates who still live in every heartbeat.
Like a river full of raging rapids and razor-sharp wire, and monsters pretending to be human.
Like funerals held beneath cloudless summer skies, rows of folding chairs holding up trembling mourners, tearful eulogies.
Like relentless media and interview requests, and TV reenactments that make bile rise in my throat.
Like memorials at Camas Creek, where flowers are caught in the reeds, laminated photos trapped beneath rock cairns.
I fold Parker’s letter and hold it to my chest with one hand, the other holding Bambi’s warm weight against me.
So many beautiful, terrible things.
So much fear and kindness and grief and love.
There’s no choosing among them. Only living through all of it. And choosing to stay.