The Voice of the Mountain

Act I – The Ascent

Mist clung to the ridgelines like a second skin, a gray-blue breath that softened the sawteeth of the Appalachians until they looked almost merciful. Cole guided his old pickup along the ribbon of two-lane road that threaded through the hills, one hand steady on the wheel, the other worrying the fray on the cuff of his jacket. The radio had given up on music two counties back and settled into a low static that reminded him of rain on a tent. He let it whisper.

The air smelled like wet leaves and woodsmoke, like November and something older. He rolled the window down, inviting the cold inside to keep him awake. The mountains rose and fell around him in patient waves, hills stacked behind hills, a world that seemed to go on forever and never change.

He checked the folded paper on the passenger seat—directions scrawled in a waitress’s looping hand, edges damp from his palm. There was a name at the top: Raven’s Fork. A town or a rumor. He followed the mile markers as if they were prayers.

A year ago he would have laughed at himself. A year ago, he woke to coffee and a kiss, to a text that said be safe, see you tonight, to the comfortable choreography of two people who knew each other’s routines so well they could dance with their eyes closed. A year ago, he thought the world was understandable. He thought love was a river with no end.

Now it was a map drawn in pencil, lines smudged, a compass that spun.

The first sign of town was a hand-painted board nailed to a post: WELCOME TO RAVEN’S FORK — POP 603. Then came the bait shop, the brick library with a sagging roof, the post office with a flag that snapped in the wind. He coasted into a gravel lot next to a squat building labeled HOLLOW HOUSE DINER, neon coffee cup flickering in the window like a tired heart.

Inside, the heat wrapped around him, thick with the smell of bacon grease and cinnamon. A bell above the door complained at his entrance. Locals lined the counter, elbows bowed, faces weathered by a lifetime of winter. The world reduced itself to stainless steel and the hiss of the flat-top and a country song that sounded like a private joke between the singer and the guitar.

He took a booth by the window. A waitress appeared with a pot and poured without asking. “You look like trouble,” she said, not unkindly.

“Just passing through,” he lied, hands around the mug, grateful for heat he could hold.

She had the posture of someone who had seen everything twice: short dark hair, crow’s-feet that deepened when she smiled. Her tag said EVELYN. “People who say that,” she said, “usually aren’t.”

He nodded at the wall where Polaroids were tucked into the frame of a faded Coca-Cola mirror—smiling fishermen with their catch, Little League teams, a couple in prom clothes under a paper moon. “I’m looking for someone,” he said, voice low as if it mattered. “A woman. Lives up in the hills. People say she… helps.”

The room seemed to listen without moving. Forks paused, eyes didn’t exactly look over, but the air changed.

Evelyn rapped her knuckles on the table as if she were knocking on his doubt. “Folks say a lot.”

“I’ve come a long way.”

“That’s what the last one said.” She topped off his cup, then leaned on the back of the booth. “There’s always a story. Midwife, witch, saint, con artist. Depends who you ask and what you’re needing her to be.”

“What do you think?”

Evelyn smiled without showing teeth. “I think the mountain keeps its own counsel. And I think if you go asking it for something, you better be ready for what it asks back.”

Cole looked down at his hands. The skin across his knuckles was split from the cold. He had sold the house two months ago and pretended it was practical. He had left the job with a letter that said thank you for the opportunities and meant I can’t breathe inside those walls. He had a storage unit with three boxes that mattered and ten that didn’t. Everything else had gone to strangers in pickup trucks who handed him cash and asked if he was sure, as if they wanted him to be.

He was tired of people wanting him to be sure.

He cleared his throat. “I heard she lives near a place called Bear Church.”

“That’s a trailhead. No church, just a rock that looks like a bear decided to sit a spell. You’ll find it if you don’t try too hard.” She tore a paper placemat in half and drew him a map: the highway becoming a smaller road becoming a dirt ribbon, a creek, a switchback, the trailhead carved into the sketch like a wishbone.

Evelyn slid the map across the table and pinned it there with her finger. “Take water. Take a coat. Don’t take your pride; it won’t help.”

He folded the paper and tucked it into his jacket. “Thank you.”

She tapped his knuckles. “You look like someone who’s been holding his breath for too long.” She straightened, the easy banter dimming. “If you see her—if anybody sees her—it’s because she sees you first.”

He paid in cash, threw in a tip that made her raise an eyebrow and accept without arguing. At the door, he paused and turned back. “What did the last one ask for?”

Evelyn wiped a ring of coffee from the counter, watched it blur and disappear. “Same thing everyone asks for,” she said. “A way back.”

Outside, the sky had opened a little, the mist thinning to reveal peaks that stepped back into distance. He drove until the asphalt surrendered to gravel and the gravel surrendered to dirt. Trees leaned over the road, branches knitting a dim roof that shed the day one leaf at a time. The truck’s tires whispered over fallen oak and poplar leaves, a susurration like paper promises.

He parked where the track ended. A hand-lettered sign nailed to a tree said BEAR CHURCH with an arrow pointing left, as if the forest had a sense of humor. He packed a day’s worth of stubbornness into his backpack—water, a few protein bars, a first-aid kit he pretended not to need, a lighter, a knife, a wool blanket, the photo he couldn’t look at and couldn’t leave behind.

The photo was worn along the edges where his thumb had worried it into a new shape. She faced the camera with a braid over one shoulder, sun catching the flecks in her eyes. They had been standing on a beach in late summer, wind pushing at them like an eager child, noses pink from salt and sun, the horizon in their mouths. If he kept still, he could hear the laughter that came next.

He sealed the memory away like a dangerous fire and started up the trail.

The mountain accepted his weight without complaint. The path switchbacked through a forest of oak and maple that had outlived everything but itself, trunks as wide as his grief, bark ridged like the lines around Evelyn’s eyes. Crows argued somewhere ahead, their voices a rasped chorus. A squirrel performed a ritual on a log as if officiating at his arrival. He tried not to take everything personally and failed.

He walked until his thighs throbbed and his breath grew loud. The creek appeared beside him, a ribbon of water with the habit of stones. It kept him company without speaking, throwing itself over small falls as if it enjoyed the tumble. He crossed a footbridge slick with moss and felt the give of wood beneath his boots, a living thing yielding and holding.

As noon softened toward afternoon, the trail steepened. Rock outcrops jutted like the backs of sleeping beasts. The sky overhead thinned to a brighter gray, the kind that promised weather or mercy depending on who was doing the praying. When he stopped and listened, he heard nothing manufactured—no tires, no engines, no human voice. The silence opened like a door he hadn’t known was in the wall.

His phone had no service. He switched it off and slipped it into his back pocket as if putting a child down for a nap.

He climbed until the Bear Church appeared: a granite outcrop shaped like a hulking animal in permanent contemplation. Lichen patterned its flanks in greens and pale grays, a preacher’s robe fallen open. At its base, someone had arranged river stones into a careful circle. The center held a whiskey bottle half filled with rainwater and a cluster of wildflowers already browning. Offerings. He stood outside the ring as if waiting to be invited to sit, then stepped in anyway and lowered himself to the ground.

The wind carried the smell of pine resin and a faint, high sweetness he couldn’t place. He drank, ate half a bar without tasting, leaned back against the bear’s granite shoulder. He hadn’t slept well in months, not in ways that mattered, not without the sudden drop into darkness where the accident played itself in a loop, headlights and glass and the metal shriek that turned into silence. He closed his eyes anyway, put his hand over the left side of his chest, and felt the dull throb that had become his metronome.

A branch cracked in the trees and his heart startled. He opened his eyes to see a deer regarding him with the calm disdain of someone observing a bad haircut. He let out the breath he was holding, palm still on his chest. “I’m not here for you,” he said. His voice sounded wrong in the open air, a thing that had forgotten how to stretch.

The deer flicked an ear and bolted, white flag flashing.

He waited for a sign he could recognize: a sudden appearance, a voice, a miracle dressed as coincidence. The mountain answered with its own language—crow calls, the creek’s chatter, wind walking up the ravine. He sat there until the light tipped. A fine rain whispered and stopped, as if the day had sighed. When chill seeped through his jacket, he finally rose, shouldered his pack, and followed the trail farther in.

He left the mark of roads and towns behind. The trail became a suggestion. He navigated by what felt truer than his map, the terrain’s logic, the tug of his wanting. He climbed the spine of a ridge and then down the other side into a hollow that held damp muffled air as if a giant were cupping it. Ferns feathered the edges of a narrow stream. A fallen tree made a bridge and a bench.

He made camp before the light died completely. He had learned that rule young and remembered it with a grateful body. He cleared a small space, ringed a fire pit with stones that fit his hands, coaxed flame from kindling with the patience he had for only this one thing. Fire took, then grew, then gave its approval in the language of crackle. He warmed his palms above it and watched the flames sketch themselves against the dark.

The night came on in layers—blue to purple to something like velvet. Stars pricked through, hesitant and then bold. The fire’s light made a small country that kept back the rest. In that country, he boiled water for instant soup, burned his tongue, felt human for twelve minutes. He kept the photo in his pocket and didn’t take it out. There were some nights he could stand to look and some he couldn’t. This felt like the latter.

The forest spoke in small sounds: a fox passing as a punctuation mark, owls negotiating the paragraphs of darkness, the creek telling the same story over and over with new inflections. Once, something screamed far away, which could have been a bobcat or his own mind. He tightened the blanket around his shoulders and let the fire’s warmth unspool the coil inside his chest a fraction of an inch.

When sleep came, it took him by the wrist and led him down a familiar hallway. He walked into the kitchen of the old house as if it still belonged to him. Her mug was in the sink, lipstick like a red parenthesis on the rim. The window over the sink held morning light like an offering. He turned and she was there, braid over her shoulder, eyebrows lifted in a question he had answered a hundred times with a kiss.

“Mae,” he said. His voice broke in the middle like ice on a creek.

She smiled and came toward him and he reached—always the reach—and the kitchen lengthened into a tunnel and she drifted backward as if on a track, and he ran and the floor under his feet behaved like water and the tunnel filled with the sound of horn and brakes and crushing metal and then—the silence. That cruel, precise silence that followed the noise like a verdict. He stood in it, relieved by the familiarity of the hurt and sickened by it, too.

A touch on his shoulder. Gentle. Present. He turned, expecting no one and finding no one.

He woke with a start, the fire collapsed into a red eye that blinked in the wind. His breath fogged in the cold. A thread of dawn had begun somewhere beyond the ridge, a soft line like a seam in the world’s coat. He fed the fire and watched it grow back, the way a body did when you asked it kindly enough. He stepped away to relieve himself, breath in a cloud, stars stubborn in the bare branches.

When he returned to the fire ring, something had changed that he couldn’t name. Not a sound, not a shape. A feeling, like walking into a room and finding that someone has been there, rearranged the air.

“Hello?” he said, feeling foolish and feeling it anyway.

Wind moved through the trees—west to east, a long, cool hand. He sat again. He held his palms toward the fire until they stung. He held them there longer than comfort would suggest, as if heat could sear the doubt out of him.

After a time, he drew the photo from his pocket. The plastic sleeve caught the light with a tired sheen. He looked into Mae’s eyes, and for the thousandth time, the thousand-and-first, he felt the tightness drag. Grief found the tender place it knew so well and pressed. He inhaled and it sharpened; he exhaled and it dulled. He let it. He had learned at least that.

He spoke to the picture because he couldn’t speak to the air. “You’d hate all this,” he said, a corner of his mouth betraying a smile. “The dirt. The way my socks smell. You always said bugs had rights but only outside.”

In the photo, she kept laughing, caught forever in that shape. He traced the edge of it with his thumb. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he admitted to plastic and flame and trees. “But I can’t stay in that house. I can’t stay in that day.”

The wind softened, as if the mountain were listening rather than merely hearing. Fire popped. A coal collapsed into itself and glowed brighter.

He put the photo away before the ritual turned into self-punishment. He closed his eyes, leaned back, let the sky press its cold cheek against his face. His breath slowed. For a moment—less than a heartbeat—everything lined up: the creek, the wind, his chest, the low hum of embers. A balance so exquisite he didn’t know he was inside it until it was gone.

The first birds began in the pale wash before sunrise, thin silver notes that braided with the dark and pulled at it like thread. He ground the coals to black with a stick, poured water until the steam lifted and went thin. He rolled the damp ash with his boot, erased his mark. Backpack on, blanket folded, he tamped the earth with his palm as if promising to return it untroubled.

He set off up the hollow, following the stream away from the trail he had lost. The world smelled new, like a book that hadn’t been opened. Light came slowly here, teased through the branches. He walked with a sense that he was being carried rather than moving under his own power, his steps fitting into a rhythm older than his grief.

He didn’t hear her approach.

Later, he’d try to remember if the birds had fallen silent or if the wind had paused or if there had been a sign he could claim. He would find only this: the feeling that the air had thickened, become more honest, and then a voice—not behind him or before him but simply there—that said, “You’ve been calling for me a long time.”

He turned.

She stood just beyond the drift of hemlock shadow, as integral to the place as the moss on the stones. She wasn’t young and she wasn’t old. Her gray hair was braided and wrapped like a crown that didn’t need announcing. Her clothes layered green and slate and brown until she looked like a hillside in winter. Her face gave the impression of having been carved by weather: lines earned, eyes clear, mouth soft, all of it made for expression rather than display.

He didn’t speak. His heart did—one heavy thud that made him aware of the bruise of it again.

She nodded toward his chest as if hearing it. “Pain makes an honest drummer,” she said. “Come along.”

“Wait,” he managed, lifting a hand, as if stopping her would slow everything else in the world, too. “Are you—”

She smiled, and the forest seemed to accept the answer before he could form the question. “Names won’t help you,” she said. “I have as many as this creek has bends. You can have the one you need.”

“What if I need… a miracle?”

The smile thinned into something like sympathy. “Then you’ll want to stop needing and start listening.”

She turned and began to walk. He followed, because his body had already made the decision his mind would not admit to wanting. The path she used did not exist until she placed her foot; then it was inevitable. The mountain breathed around them, long slow exhalations that moved the branches and brushed his cheek as if testing his temperature.

They came to a clearing that might not have been a clearing yesterday or an hour from now. A small cabin rested against the rise of the hill, weathered boards and a roof that had learned humility, smoke rising from a narrow pipe at an angle that suggested apology rather than announcement. A porch held a chair and a stack of split wood and a broom that looked like it had opinions.

She climbed the porch steps and glanced back. “Since you’ve come this far,” she said, “you might as well sit.”

He did. The chair accepted him with a creak that sounded vaguely like judgment. She handed him a tin mug that steamed. The smell was spruce tips and honey and something bitter the way medicine is bitter—the way truth can be. He blew across the surface and watched the breath he couldn’t see make something else visible.

She sat opposite, hands around her own mug, shoulders arranged in the posture of someone who knew how to carry both silence and words. The mountain arranged itself beyond her like a listening congregation. For a long time that wasn’t long, they only breathed.

Then she spoke, and her voice sounded not like a sound that traveled but like a bell rung inside his ribs. “The only real emotion,” she said, “is Love.”

He almost laughed. Instead a small sound escaped that might have been the ghost of one. “I can think of a few others,” he said, relieved to find he still knew how to argue. “Joy, awe, hope. And if we’re doing opposites—anger, jealousy, fear. Pick your poison.”

“All branches,” she said, “on one tree. All shades of one light.”

“That can’t be true.” He set the mug on his knee and curled his hands around it until the heat warned him. “Anger feels real. It feels like… like surviving.”

“It feels like the way you learned to hold your breath.” She tilted her head as if listening to a bird. “Fear is not the opposite of Love. It is the absence. The shadow where Love has not yet been recognized. Anger, jealousy, despair—those are fear trying to remember how to become Love again.”

He stared at her because the alternative was to shut his eyes against the heat that climbed his throat. “You’re telling me my grief is a kind of forgetting?”

“I’m telling you your grief is love looking for a door.”

Wind moved across the clearing, lifted a strand of her hair, set the broom to a lazy rocking. Somewhere, a raven called a single note and let it hang. He didn’t speak into it. He drank the rest of whatever she had given him and found that it had given something back. Warmth spread from his chest outward instead of the other way around, a small migration.

He placed the empty mug on the porch rail. It left a ring that caught the light, then faded. He looked at her hands and then at her eyes. “I came to ask you to—” He couldn’t finish the sentence. The word fix stuck in his mouth like a fishbone.

She rescued him without mercy. “To undo what happened,” she said. “To place your days back where they once belonged.”

He swallowed. “Or to help me forget.”

She shook her head, and pity didn’t make an appearance. “Forgetting is a cheap mercy. You wouldn’t thank me for it later.”

He opened his mouth to argue, to ask for proof or a sign or a rule. He found none that would hold. The wind brought the scent of snow from some higher hollow. He didn’t know if it would arrive today or in a month, only that it existed and would have its time.

She set her mug down beside his. “We’ll speak about sides soon enough,” she said. “The trouble you get into picking them, the way you carve the world and call it truth. But first, we’ll breathe.”

“I’ve been breathing,” he said, meaning I’ve been surviving.

“You’ve been exchanging air,” she said, and stood. “Different thing.”

He followed her off the porch and into the clearing where the light pooled. She touched two fingers to the center of his chest, as precise as a compass finding north. The place under her touch shone with a pain that had weight and shape, a coin pressed into a bruise. He flinched.

“Your heart is not broken,” she said. “It is closed.”

He felt the flare of anger he had kept polished exactly for this moment. “And you know that because you’re… what? Magic?”

“Because I’ve closed mine and opened it again more times than pride will let me admit.” She removed her hand. “Grief is love without a door. We’ll make one.”

He stood in the cold, the mountain tall and indifferent and intimate all at once. The porch creaked; the broom sighed; the wind came down from the ridge and laid a cool palm against his face.

“Show me,” he said.

She nodded, as if he had only now asked the right question. “Good,” she said softly. “Now we can begin.”

Act II – The Mountain’s Wisdom

The woman led Cole down a narrow path that curved behind the cabin. The trees thickened again, birch and hemlock crowding close until the light fractured into a mosaic of gold and shadow. The sound of water returned—a steady murmur, like breath drawn and released by the earth itself.

They came to a small pool fed by a trickling stream. Its surface was glass, the reflection so pure it seemed to hover above the world rather than within it. She knelt beside it and gestured for him to do the same.

“This place remembers,” she said. “Everything the mountain has seen, it keeps.”

Cole crouched awkwardly, his knees popping. “Then it’s seen a lot of broken things.”

“All things break,” she said. “That’s how the light gets through.”

He wanted to scoff—some part of him still clung to cynicism like armor—but the forest quieted him. The trees felt sentient here, watching, leaning in.

She dipped her hand into the pool. Ripples spread outward, distorting her reflection until it became a shimmer of light and shadow. “Love,” she said, “is the current beneath all things. Every joy you’ve ever felt, every kindness you’ve ever given or received—it is all Love in motion. What you call happiness, peace, wonder—those are just the ways Love wears different clothes to visit you.”

He frowned. “That’s poetic, but it doesn’t explain the rest of it. Pain. Anger. Fear. You can’t tell me those are love too.”

“No,” she said softly. “They are the absence of it.”

She looked up, her eyes gray as rain. “Fear is not a rival to Love. It has no power of its own. It is the void left when Love is not present. Anger, jealousy, despair—these are only echoes of the same silence. Fear is Love forgotten.”

Cole stared at the water. His reflection trembled there, divided by every ripple. “Then why does it feel stronger than Love?”

“Because you’ve fed it longer,” she said simply. “Fear thrives on attention. You’ve built your world around avoiding it. Love doesn’t shout—it waits. You hear fear first because it’s louder.”

He let out a breath that shuddered. “You make it sound simple.”

“It is simple,” she said. “It’s living that makes it hard.”

They sat in silence for a while, the kind that didn’t demand to be filled. He watched the light slide across the surface of the pool and wondered when he’d last sat still long enough to see something change slowly.

Finally, she rose and brushed her palms on her skirt. “Come,” she said. “There’s more to see.”

They walked until the forest opened onto a high overlook. From here, the land unrolled in every direction—mountains stacked like the backs of sleeping gods, mist breathing through their valleys. The world below looked timeless, untouched by the chaos of the one he’d left behind.

“You see how it all fits,” she said, sweeping a hand over the horizon. “Every tree, every shadow, every fall and rise of ground—none of it fights to be right. The river doesn’t argue with the rock. They shape each other.”

Cole followed her gaze. “You’re talking about balance.”

“I’m talking about Love,” she said. “Love doesn’t take sides.”

He frowned. “That’s not realistic. People have to choose. Right or wrong. Good or evil. You can’t just float through life pretending there’s no difference.”

“Pretending?” Her smile was gentle but sharp. “Choosing sides is how you pretend. The moment you declare one truth against another, you divide what was whole. You say, ‘This is mine, that is yours.’ You build walls. Love builds bridges.”

He shook his head. “That sounds naïve. The world doesn’t work like that.”

“No,” she agreed. “The world you built doesn’t. You’ve mistaken conflict for clarity. You think belonging to a side gives meaning to your pain. But Love doesn’t need enemies to know itself.”

Cole turned away, staring at the valley. “And what? We just stop caring about what’s right?”

“Care, yes,” she said. “Judge, no. There’s a difference.”

He let out a bitter laugh. “You’re telling me if I choose a belief, I’m choosing separation.”

“I’m saying when you cling to it,” she said, “when you make it the measure of worth, both yours and others, you close yourself off. Love has no borders. No team colors. No conditions.”

Her gaze found him again. “You’ve made an idol of your pain, Cole. You’ve chosen a side—the side that says the world ended the day she left you.”

He opened his mouth to protest but couldn’t. The truth of it sat between them like a third presence.

“You don’t need to be right,” she whispered. “You need to be whole.”

The wind swept across the overlook, cool and wide. The clouds parted, revealing a shaft of sunlight that fell in a single beam across the valley below, igniting the mist into gold. For the first time in a long time, Cole didn’t look away.

They returned to the cabin as the afternoon deepened. She stirred a pot over the fire while he sat on the porch steps, staring at his hands. His fingers trembled slightly, and he realized it wasn’t from the cold.

When she brought him a bowl, he accepted it in silence. The soup was simple—beans, herbs, something wild and savory—but it warmed him more than food should.

She sat beside him, and the quiet between them changed shape again, gentler now, less guarded.

“You think she’s gone,” the woman said. “Your Mae.”

He froze.

“She’s not.” Her voice was soft, almost apologetic. “You just stopped looking where she is.”

He blinked back the sting in his eyes. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t talk about her like—”

“Like she still exists?” she finished. “She does, Cole. Not here.” She tapped his temple. “Here.” Then she placed a hand over his heart. ”

He stared at her hand. It was warm, solid. “I can’t feel her,” he whispered.

“You can’t feel anything,” she said. “Not yet. You’ve let grief build a wall where a window should be.”

He swallowed. “How do I let her go?”

Her eyes softened. “You don’t. You let Love back in.”

Act III – The Letting Go

She led him back to the clearing, the early afternoon sky a dome of bright sunshine.

“Sit,” she said, motioning to the ground.

He did.

“Close your eyes.”

He hesitated. “And then?”

“Feel.”

He almost laughed, but something in her tone stopped him. He closed his eyes.

“Where does it hurt?” she asked.

He touched his chest, where the ache had lived so long it felt like identity. “Here.”

“Don’t run from it,” she said. “Invite it closer. Ask what it wants.”

He inhaled shakily, and the ache expanded—hot, sharp, impossible. His throat tightened.

“Breathe into it,” she whispered. “Give it room.”

The tears came without warning. Years of restraint collapsed. He doubled over, gasping. The sound that left him wasn’t quite human—a low, broken noise that came from somewhere deeper than breath.

She didn’t move to comfort him. She only sat, presence steady as gravity.

He saw flashes—the car, the screech of tires, her hand reaching, the impossible stillness that followed. He saw himself kneeling by twisted metal, screaming her name. He saw the months afterward, moving through rooms like a ghost, pretending to function. And beneath it all, the one thought that haunted every heartbeat: It should have been me.

The woman’s voice broke through the storm of memory. “Grief,” she said, “is love trapped in a cage of guilt. Open the door.”

“I can’t,” he choked.

“You already are.”

He pressed his palms into the dirt, as if anchoring himself to the world. His sobs slowed, then deepened into trembling silence. The air felt charged, alive. Something within him loosened—not gone, but unbound.

Then came warmth. Not from the fire, not from the air—but from within. A soft, pulsing light spread through his chest. He felt Mae—not as memory or ghost, but as presence. Not outside him, but inside, everywhere.

“Mae…” he whispered.

The woman’s voice was a thread of wind. “There she is.”

He saw her smile—not the static image of the photograph, but the living spark of it, free from sorrow. And for the first time since that night, he didn’t try to hold her. He simply let her be.  He felt her presence all around, and within. Tears ran down his face, not from grief for the first time in over a year, but from love.

The warmth settled, quiet and vast. The pain remained, but it was no longer an enemy. It was a reminder.

When he opened his eyes, the afternoon sun shone bright, the sky rinsed in pale blue.

The woman stood a few paces away, watching him. “You see?” she said softly. “Love never leaves. Only your permission for it does.”

He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “What happens now?”

She smiled. “You live.”

Cole hiked down the mountain in silence. The forest was the same, yet utterly changed. The air hummed with unseen music, each sound part of a single chord—the creek’s murmur, the wing-beat of a crow, his own breath folding into it.

At the trailhead, his truck waited, dew-beaded and patient. Before climbing in, he turned for one last look.

The forest stood untouched, but he felt her still—the woman, the mountain, the Love she’d pointed him toward. A breeze lifted through the trees, brushing his cheek like a hand. It carried a scent he couldn’t name, something wild and clean. He smiled through the sting in his eyes.

Driving back toward town, he stopped at the diner. The bell jingled as he stepped inside. Evelyn looked up from her coffee pot and froze mid-pour.

“Well,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “You found her.”

He didn’t answer. He just smiled.

She nodded slowly, as if confirming something to herself. “People come back different when they find her,” she said. “Lighter.”

He reached into his pocket and placed the folded map on the counter. “If anyone else comes looking,” he said, “tell them the mountain will answer when they’re ready.”

She gave a small smile. “Always does.”

Outside, the sun hung low in the sky. Cole leaned against the truck, eyes closed, face tilted to the warmth. He felt her there—Mae’s laugh, the mountain’s heartbeat, the stillness between. The ache was still there too, but now it pulsed in rhythm with something vast and tender.

He whispered, not to the air but to the Love that filled it: "I remember.”

The wind answered, soft and certain.

And as the last of the sun’s rays warmed his face, Cole finally breathed—fully, freely, and without fear.