47. MEGHAN

Cascade, Idaho

As we approached the turnoff to Highway 55, the sun was just dipping beneath the ridge to the west, sending the valley into a sort of murky, pre-sunset gloom.

April had been carrying Kimmie for the past few minutes. Emma was holding on to the back of April's shirt, stumbling forward on sheer adrenaline. All three of them were ready to crash.

But we'd finally made it. April would flag someone down, who would take pity on the exhausted young mother with two little girls caked in dust and gasping for breath. The police would be called. The girls would be safe. It would be over.

We could all hear the sound of a vehicle approaching from somewhere down the asphalt, its tires zipping on the smooth surface along Highway 55.

As the sound got closer, April set Kimmie next to Emma. "I'll be right back, okay? Just stay here."

Both Emma and Kimmie looked like they might panic. I understood. Being left alone was not an appealing option right now.

April pointed at the shoulder of the road, up a steep rise. "I'll be a few feet away. You can see me. But I need to hurry." Before they could protest, she turned and scrambled up the side of the steep shoulder to peer over the edge.

Brecia and Skye stayed with the girls, whispering comfort. I climbed the crumbling shoulder with April, staring down the road in the deepening shadows.

As the vehicle came around the bend, April squinted hard.

I felt my heart sink as the nebulous shape moved toward us. With its headlights on, it was going to be difficult to tell what kind of vehicle it was until it was right next to the shoulder of the road. Was it an SUV? A truck? A minivan?

There was no way to know for certain.

Brecia, Skye, and I had popped the minivan's headlights and tail lights back in the garage. But that had been in the daytime. No one had even noticed, as far as I could tell. And no one had driven the minivan since arriving at the cabin.

It was too much to hope that James would drive off the edge of the road in the dark. And given the Carsons' propensity for emergency preparedness, they probably had spare bulbs somewhere in the van itself.

For all any of us knew, any set of headlights might be him. And if it was the minivan—and James—he would see April before she had time to dart back out of sight.

So she stayed hidden, closing her eyes as a spray of dust and small pebbles trickled down the shoulder embankment and onto her hair.

The only real option was to keep moving.

The girls didn't ask questions as April scooted back down the embankment and took their hands. She began leading them along the bottom of the embankment, moving onto the road itself for an easier path when the steep rise leveled out and there were no tires to be heard or headlights to be seen.

In some ways, the cover of darkness was comforting. Unless we got caught in the glare of someone's headlights, April and the girls were now invisible. But as another set of tires whirred closer and April pulled the girls back into the meager cover of the narrow shoulder ledge, pressing everyone into the sparse brush, I heard both Kimmie and Emma start to cry in earnest.

"Are we always going to be lost?" Emma hiccupped. "Are we going to have to sleep in the woods?"

"That was scratchy. Where is the bear?" Kimmie sobbed as she swiped at her face, which was now lightly crisscrossed with a patch of angry welts from the brush. Her words dissolved into little shrieks as a branch snapped somewhere out of sight in the darkness of the trees.

April picked her up and stumbled forward without responding as Emma latched back onto her shirt, nearly toppling both April and Kimmie as she tripped over a rock.

I really wasn't sure how long April could keep going like this. There was no clear end in sight. She was still in the crosshairs of a predator. And she was still the sole protector of two little girls on the brink of total meltdown. It was agony to even watch.

Somehow, our posse trudged onward, excruciatingly slowly along the crumbling, narrow shoulder of the road that dipped and fell, weaving through the towering pines overhead. We moved forward in silence broken only by the sound of April and Emma's softly crunching footsteps, the whir of the occasional approaching vehicle, the snapping of branches in the darkness, and the whispers of encouragement from Skye, me, or Brecia when Kimmie or Emma started to whimper again.

I thought about the stories I'd heard about mothers lifting cars off their babies or fighting off a pack of wolves on the Oregon Trail. I'd always sort of thought they were tall tales or at least uncommon. But now I thought that maybe it was just the wolf pack at your door or the car on top of your child that was the rare thing. Maybe this strength, this superhuman power was always there, latent. I thought about my own mom, and how I would show her this moment someday when we found each other again. How I'd tell her that I knew she'd carry me this impossible distance too.

It must have been an hour before Brecia suddenly said, "Look! Do you see that?"

I looked down the stretch of road that had straightened out into a long runway. The shoulder had widened, flanked by tall grasses in a sort of meadow. In the distance, beyond the pines that bookended the narrow highway, the horizon was faintly glowing.

"I think that's Cascade," Skye said, scanning the meadow and the treeline ahead. "Those aren't headlights. And the sun hasn't been down for that long. Those are city lights."

April saw them too, her grim expression suddenly melting just a little into relief. She picked up the pace, letting go of Kimmie with one hand to squeeze Emma's shoulder. "Babies, we're almost there. Do you see those lights in the distance? We're going to be safe soon. We're so close. Just stay with me, okay? Just for a little longer."