The Father They Buried

The helicopter hovered above the frozen ledge like a red shadow caught in the storm.

Its blades hammered the air, tearing loose sheets of snow from the mountain and sending them spinning across the narrow shelf of rock. Far below, the valley disappeared behind white clouds. One wrong movement would send a person sliding toward a drop so deep that the bottom could not be seen.

Emma Vale sat pressed against the cliff wall, both hands wrapped around her stomach.

She could no longer feel her feet.

Her dusty pink maternity dress was soaked at the hem, and the cream cardigan around her shoulders had stiffened with ice. Every breath felt thin and unfinished. She was eight months pregnant, stranded thousands of feet above the nearest road, with no memory of how she had survived the fall from the upper trail.

A rope descended through the snow.

A rescuer in a red insulated jacket lowered himself toward her. His boots struck the ledge, and he immediately secured his safety line to a steel anchor hammered into the rock.

He turned.

For one impossible second, he did not move.

The man’s face went pale beneath the frost on his dark beard. His eyes widened as if he had found someone who belonged to a memory rather than the living world.

Then he crossed the small distance between them and dropped to one knee.

“Emma, stay with me.”

She forced her eyes open.

The man pulled off one glove and checked her pulse with careful fingers. His hand trembled.

“How do you know my name?” she whispered.

Instead of answering, he opened a red medical bag and wrapped a silver thermal blanket around her shoulders. He spoke into the radio attached to his jacket.

“Patient conscious. Severe cold exposure. Pregnant, approximately thirty-four weeks. Prepare the stretcher.”

The helicopter crew acknowledged him through the radio.

Emma studied the rescuer’s face.

There was something familiar about the line of his jaw and the shape of his eyes. It made her uneasy, not because she recognized him, but because some part of her felt that she should.

He checked her pupils, then looked toward her stomach.

“Is the baby moving?”

“A little.”

“Any sharp pain?”

“No. Just cold.”

“You’re going to be all right.”

“You still haven’t answered me.”

His expression tightened.

“Your mother spent years searching for you.”

Emma stared at him.

“My mother died when I was five.”

“No,” he said. “That’s what you were told.”

A section of the rescue stretcher appeared through the blowing snow as the helicopter crew lowered it toward them. The rescuer reached up to guide the cable away from the cliff.

His jacket shifted.

Something old and white showed from an inside pocket.

A photograph.

Emma reached for it before she could stop herself.

The man froze.

The photograph showed a little blonde girl sitting on a man’s shoulders beside a blue lake. The girl was laughing. One of her front teeth was missing.

Emma had seen that face every time she looked at her childhood pictures.

It was her.

The man carrying her was the rescuer kneeling in front of her.

She looked at the photograph again, searching for an explanation that did not exist.

“Who are you?”

The man’s controlled expression finally broke. Grief crossed his face, followed by something deeper and more painful than grief.

“My name is Daniel Mercer.”

The name meant nothing to her.

But when he spoke again, the mountain seemed to go silent around them.

“I’m the father they told you was dead.”

Emma’s breath caught.

“No.”

“I know this is impossible to hear right now.”

“My father died in a boating accident.”

“There was no boating accident.”

“You’re lying.”

“I wish I were.”

The stretcher touched the ledge beside them. Daniel secured its safety line and spread another thermal blanket across it.

Emma watched him move.

A scar ran from the edge of his left eyebrow toward his temple. She remembered drawing that scar as a child, though she had never understood why. Her adoptive mother had always called it an imaginary friend’s mark.

“You disappeared when you were five,” Daniel said. “Your mother and I never stopped looking.”

Emma shook her head.

The motion made the world tilt.

“My parents raised me.”

“The people who raised you knew exactly who you were.”

Her heartbeat quickened.

A memory surfaced without warning.

A dark car.

Her mother screaming her name from the other side of a rain-covered window.

A woman’s hand pulling Emma backward.

Then nothing.

Daniel placed one hand against her shoulder.