Grace grips his other hand, hoping he can feel her. She bends down and kisses his cheek. It’s icy, but she lingers there, letting her lips heat his skin before sitting back up.
When she does, his eyes are locked on hers.
He looks happy.
He swallows, then speaks. His voice a raspy whisper, a dry leaf skimming across a frozen lake. “Grace,” he says.
She squeezes his hand harder, tries to rub warmth into his fingers.
“Grace, do you see them?”
She opens her mouth, but doesn’t know how to respond. She looks to David, but he only shakes his head sadly, as if it doesn’t matter anymore.
And maybe it doesn’t. But she still wants to know. She feels that it’s somehow important, so she says, “Who, Peter? See who?”
With surprising strength, or purely by power of will, Peter lifts his head. He looks all around the empty landscape, his eyes darting from place to place. “There,” he says. “And there.”
He looks back at her, amused. He smiles weakly, teeth red with blood. “You can’t see them, but they’re here. They’re all around us, Grace, and I saved them. I saved them all.”
Grace watches her father’s return from the house. She wills him to move faster, to help her get Peter inside. Get him to shelter. Care for his wound. Heal him . . .
Peter’s fingers suddenly tighten around hers and she turns back to look into his face, into his eyes. He’s still smiling, but it grows weak now, and she knows, right then, that there’s no nursing him back to health, that no amount of warmth or medicine will cure him, will keep him here, with her.
With the knowing, her heart slows. She feels the anxiety drain from her body. The need, the desire to help him, to hold him, slips through her like a dream that dies upon waking.
“I love you,” she says.
“They’re all around us, Grace . . . they’re waiting for me.”
David buries his head into Peter’s shoulder, weeping. Through wrenching tears, he lifts his face and whispers something into his ear.
“Yes, Peter,” Grace says, and lowers her own face close to his. “You saved them, and it’s okay. It’s okay now.”
Peter’s head settles back into the new snow. A soft exhale escapes his lips. His eyes lose their focus and turn upward to stare, forever, into the blue open sky.