Elizabeth Armstrong was buckled into the passenger seat of her untrustworthy 1989 Ford Bronco with her eyes closed. Already tired from a long bartending shift at the Sled Dog Brewing Company, she’d reluctantly attended an after-bar party thrown by her brother Emmett’s friend who lived in a small community east of their hometown of Golden Falls, Alaska.

Lulled by the rhythm of the windshield wipers fighting off what had been merely a soft snowfall when they’d left the party, she vaguely heard the song on the radio about summer and blue skies and a love that never ends. In her dreamy half-asleep state, that kind of summer felt possible in a way it never did when she was awake.

Emmett was quiet beside her in the driver’s seat, and the drive was calm and peaceful—until it wasn’t. Just like her life. Going along and going along, and then POW, the universe would scream at her. Don’t get comfortable, Elizabeth. Don’t think for one second that life will ever be easy for you.

The Bronco didn’t skid on the icy highway. A skid would have jolted her awake. Instead, she woke when her seat belt tightened against her as the vehicle plunged down an embankment after sideswiping a speed limit sign at full speed.

She saw Emmett’s chest slam into the steering wheel and the side of his head smash against the driver’s side window. Thankfully, the window didn’t break. The headlights stayed lit, and all Elizabeth could see out the windshield was the soft white pillow of snow surrounding the vehicle.

“Emmett!” she cried to her brother, older by five years. He was thirty to her twenty-five. “Are you okay?”

He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. What was he thinking, driving at four in the morning during a snowstorm without buckling up? He wasn’t thinking, she knew. It was like his brain had stopped working in the past few months. Mistake after mistake was piling up behind him, and driving that night was yet another mistake. They should have gone home after she got off from work like she’d wanted.

She grabbed the collar of his coat and yanked him upright. “Emmett?”

He groaned but didn’t open his eyes. He was bleeding from the forehead, mouth, and from a gash on his right hand, and a lump was swelling on his temple.

Elizabeth shook his shoulder. “Can you hear me?”

When he didn’t respond, her fear went into overdrive. She pulled out her cell phone and could hardly hold it for how she was shaking. Emmett might be an idiot sometimes, but he’d stuck by her through the worst hard times, and her love for him was fierce. All they’d ever had in this world was each other.

“I’m calling 911,” she said loudly, trying to rouse him. “Where are we, do you know? What mile marker? Emmett? Answer me.”

“Can’t call,” he mumbled.

“We have to,” she said, although she understood his reluctance. He had no health insurance, and they barely had the savings to cover even a simple visit to the doctor’s office. There went the few hundred dollars she’d set aside for pre-nursing classes at the community college. Her dream deferred, yet again. “You might have internal bleeding or a concussion or something even worse.”

He pressed his right palm against his mouth, and his eyes latched onto hers. “I screwed up again,” he said, his words garbled from the injury to his mouth.

Yes, you did, she thought wearily.

“No worries,” she said with a resoluteness she didn’t feel. “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?”

Emmett winced as he attempted to smile. It was their family motto or, more precisely, their brother-sister motto as they tried to make their way through the world alone—alone and together—burdened by the weight of their parents’ failings.

As her finger hovered above the “Emergency Call” icon, a panicked Emmett grabbed her cellphone and clutched it to his chest.

“Hey, give it back!” She unsnapped her seatbelt and reached for it, but he wouldn’t let go. “I need to call for help!”

“You can’t.” He winced from the pain. “We need to handle this ourselves.”

“We absolutely need to call for help,” Elizabeth said. “Otherwise, we could be stuck out here for hours, and it’s below zero. But it’s okay to call. You just hit a road sign. That’s no big deal.” Then a horrible thought struck her. “Wait—you didn’t hit another car, did you?”

He shook his head.

“Then it’s okay. Just give me back my phone.”

But instead, he pushed open his door, shoving hard against the snow, grunting from the effort. He stumbled out, taking Elizabeth’s phone with him.

“Emmett, get back here!” she yelled. “Stay in the car!”

Blood dripped onto the snow as he tried to climb his way out of the ditch. He slipped twice and grunted in pain both times.

“Stay here!” she cried, scrambling over to his side of the Bronco. He paid her no mind, so she went after him, but in the time it took her to get out of the car, Emmett had made the roughly eight-foot climb to the highway and stood on the road looking down at her.

“I can’t go to the hospital.” A trail of blood revealed the path he’d climbed through the snowbank. “They can’t test my blood.”

“Why not? You didn’t drink.”

He gave her a hard look. “They’d check my system for drugs.”

Elizabeth stood in the ditch, dumbfounded. “But you don’t—”

And just like that, the realization dawned on her. He was on drugs. It explained so much: the loss of appetite, the ragged emotions, his wayward spiral.

“With all the crap we have going on?” she said, stunned. “You choose to add to it by using drugs? What are you using?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I got myself into it, and I’ll get myself out of it. But you need to say you were driving. No one can even know I was here.”

“That won’t work.” Her breath came out puffy, and her face hurt from the cold. It was the kind of cold that made it hard to talk right. A middle-of-the-night, January-in-Alaska kind of cold that made her wonder why she hadn’t packed up and left. Or, like the American golden-plover birds she loved, migrated south to Argentina for the winter.

“I had two strong drinks at the party,” she said. “My blood-alcohol level might put me over the limit. You were supposed to be the designated driver!” Fury flooded through her. So did sarcasm. “Dad will be so proud, Emmett.”

“Our father, the felon? I don’t care what he thinks.”

“But he’s coming home soon,” she said. “And we need to have our act together so we can help him get his together. And now you’ve totaled my car, and you need medical help, and there’s no way we’re going to make it back in time for you to get treated and be at work in the morning, which means you won’t be able to pay your half of the mortgage. Again.” Tears of frustration blinded her. “No matter how bad things have been, Emmett, at least we had each other. And you’re ruining even that, don’t you see? You’re ruining the only good thing we have going for us.”

“I’m sorry, Lizzie Bean, but you’ve gotta take one for the team tonight. If I go to jail, that’s months of me not being to help with the mortgage. And do you really want me going to prison right when Dad’s about to be released?”

He tossed her phone into the snow and took off across the highway, lurching unsteadily. They were in the middle of nowhere—just where the hell did he think he was going?

In the time it took her to scramble up the snowbank, he’d disappeared. She crossed the highway and peered into the culvert on the other side. She saw where he’d jumped and where he’d climbed up the other bank, leaving splatters of blood in his wake, but where had he gone from there? Was he right there, and she simply couldn’t see him because of the now-whiteout conditions? Or had he disappeared into the woods?

“Come back, Emmett! You could die out there!”

The wind blew her words back to her. She wouldn’t follow; it would be suicide on a night like this.

“Unbelievable,” she said aloud. What was it about the Armstrong men, always letting down the Armstrong women? She crossed back so she could take shelter in the Bronco. She hated to go back down there—it felt like she was descending into a snowy tomb. What if the snow kept falling and the car got buried and she couldn’t get herself back out? What if she fell asleep down there and never woke up?

Alaska was the land of big dreams and harsh realities, and the reality was that she was as likely to die on the road waiting for a passerby at four in the morning as she was to die in her vehicle. Probably more so, because her emergency supplies were in the Bronco and at least she’d be out of the wind. So into the snowy tomb she’d go.

But before she descended, she retrieved her phone and nearly wept with gratitude to find she had a signal.

She knew exactly who to call.