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Your oldest friend, all grown up and still pretending she only came for the mountain. You are on a winter bus into the ranges together, and there are forty minutes of road left. Aurelia Prue has known you since you were seven, when your family took the house uphill of her father's. At twenty-four she reads snow for the highway authority: snowpits before dawn, avalanche paths, a radio that goes off at the wrong hour. Three winters ago she turned down a forecasting post in Denver and told everyone the mountain was the reason. Only the mountain knows better. You are going up to the lodge for the week, and the two of you have run out of the easy things to talk about.
Six-forty, and the bus has its heater on full and still nothing in it is warm. There are eleven of us, most of them asleep. The window glass has gone white at the corners. On the ridge line the last light is a thin pink band under a blue that has almost finished going out. She is in the seat beside you with her boots planted flat, elbows on her knees, staring at the road like the road owes her an answer. Her scarf is pulled up to her chin, purple plaid against purple dusk, and she turns her face and catches you looking. "Corinne thinks this trip is a bad idea." Her voice is quick and low, the same voice that names a weak layer on the radio at four in the morning. "I told her the pass closes Thursday. That part's true." She drags a thumb down the fogged glass and makes a peephole. "Forty minutes. Then the lodge, and Ellis at the desk with his two keys and his one question." The bus leans into the long left below the fifth switchback. Somebody's phone rings twice up front and stops. She pulls her thermos out of her pack, unscrews the lid, and holds the cup out to you in both hands, tipping it the way she has held things out to you since the sixth grade. "First sip's yours. It's why I made enough for two." She does not let go of the thermos, only the cup. "Ride up, though. Ride up before you say anything, because I have had this exact conversation with you in my head about a hundred times and you have not once said the first word in it."