He finished the rest of his deliveries, thoughts preoccupied with Marna and Brian and, to an extent, Calder. It was late when he finally returned to base. Calder was waiting for Jack when he left the hangar, coat wrapped tight around him, auburn curls catching the snowy breeze that had swept in as the sun set.

“Otis said you took his deliveries for the day,” Calder said by way of greeting. “You could have said something.”

“Sorry, I didn't want to wake you up,” Jack said, which wasn't entirely a lie. “But listen, I've been thinking about something.”

“What?” Calder asked, jogging to keep up with Jack as he hurried back toward the house.

Back in Jack's cabin, he dragged out a map book and flipped to the one that included Mount St. Elias, opening it up fully on his kitchen table and weighing down the corners with cans of Spaghetti-Os.

“So, this is where the radio tower lost contact with Avery's team,” he said, marking the spot halfway up Elias. “And this was their planned route up the mountain.”

“Right,” Calder agreed, looking confused but warily excited. “And?”

“I made some calls on the way home,” Jack continued. “The official rescue sent a professional bush pilot in from Anchorage in on a helicopter to search the projected route up Livermore Ridge. It did several passes and saw nothing, until—”

“Until the pilot decided to check the Abruzzi Ridge instead,” Calder finished for him. “That's when it lost contact. The officials said he should never have gone that close to the northeast face of the mountain. Abruzzi Ridge isn't even climbed anymore. Something about glacial changes causing avalanches.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “The pilot knew that. But he saw something that made him think Dan and Avery were on Abruzzi Ridge. Made him so sure that he may have even attempted a landing before he crashed. Most pilots I know wouldn't make that decision lightly. He saw something that convinced him.”

“So?” Calder asked, cautiously hopeful.

“I also checked the details on the weather during the time between when radio lost contact and when the guide showed up back at base camp. He's been unconscious recovering from hypothermia pretty much since he showed up, but the doctors were able to give me an estimate on about how long they thought he'd been out there without proper gear or shelter, which gave me a span of about five days. Sometime in those first five days after they lost contact is when whatever disaster happened that separated them. And weather detail says on the third day, when they were about here-”

He pointed out the spot on the map following the planned route.

“A severe storm was blowing out of the south west. Winds harsh enough to tear a climber right off the surface. I'm betting that's the storm that separated Dan and Avery from their guide, and possibly from each other.”

“Then that’s where we need to be searching?” Calder asked, beginning to get where Jack was going with this.

“Not here,” Jack said. “Here, on the Abruzzi Ridge. No experienced guide would climb that, but a lost, confused skier might decide it was safer to descend that way than to try skiing down the relief, which would have been deadly in low visibility. I think the other rescue pilot might have guessed that too.”

“Was he right?” Calder asked, looking pale. “Do you think Avery might still be alive if he took that route?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, shaking his head. “And I don’t want to make you any promises I can’t keep. Abruzzi has its own dangers and they’re nothing to sneeze at, which is why we aren’t having this conversation with the original rescue pilot. But tomorrow I say we sweep Abruzzi Ridge and see if we can't spot whatever had that pilot so convinced he was looking in the right place.”

Calder smiled brilliantly, hope restored all at once, something that made Jack feel both delighted and guilty all at once. Both increased rapidly as Calder grabbed Jack by the collar and dragged him into a swift, rough kiss.

“What do I need to get ready?” he said a second later, letting Jack go abruptly to look down at the map again. “God, it seems too obvious now. Why weren’t we looking there before?”

And there came the guilt again, even while his lips were still tingling from the kiss.

“Because I was still hoping you would give up,” Jack admitted. He saw Calder go white, then red, jaw hardening with anger.

“You need to understand,” Jack said before Calder could start yelling. “Even with all of this, odds are hundred to one that he's still alive. That a body was all there ever would have been to find, even if the first rescue team had found him on the first day. And I'm sorry, all right? I'm sorry I let you think I was putting my best into this. I'm sorry I let you think there was a chance. I'm sorry I let you down. But this is the truth. Avery is dead.”

“But you don't know!” Calder shouted. “If we had found him yesterday, the day before yesterday… You don't know that he's already gone!”

“You can't know!” Jack shouted back, ashamed and frustrated. “You might never know! You'll be lucky if we even find a body! If we don't, you will never know! And if you don't start making peace with that, it's going to eat you alive, Calder!”

“Fuck you,” Calder shouted, red in the face and wounded in the eyes. “Fuck you! Just because you're too afraid—just because you're a coward—”

“Enough!” Jack threw his hands up and stomped toward the door, slamming it behind him.

The cold air of early evening was soothing against his burning face, but his heart was still doing barrel rolls in his chest. He hurried toward the mess hall, hoping to drown his distress. For a moment he wondered if Calder would still want to fly with him tomorrow, or if they were done. He realized, with a rush of shame, how desperately he was hoping for the former.

Otis was in the hall when Jack came in and waved him over to their usual seat.

“Trouble with the missus?” Otis teased as Jack shuffled toward him. Seeing the look on Jack’s face he frowned, teasing forgotten. He went to get them both a drink while Jack sat down.

“What happened?” he asked, pressing the drink into Jack’s hand.

Jack deliberated over how to answer that for a long few minutes, sipping his beer.

“You flew rescue for a while, right?” Jack asked. Otis looked confused for a moment, but nodded.

“A couple years,” he confirmed. “I didn’t care for the stress or the schedule. Seemed like I was always rushing off in the middle of the night to rescue some idiot tourist who read a little too much Jack London and decided he could just go live in the wilderness.”

“How do you know when you made the right call?” Jack asked, stopping Otis short. When the other man said nothing, Jack went on. “When there are two lives depending on you and you can only save one, how do you choose? And when something is a lost cause, how do you know how much energy to waste on it? How do you know you made the right call?”

“You don’t,” Otis said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. He seemed visibly confused by the question. “There is no right call.”

Jack stared into his drink searching for answers and Otis huffed.

“Things aren’t that simple,” he continued. “We can’t see the future. So two lives are depending on you, and you can only save one and the one you save dies anyway in the hospital the next night. But maybe if you’d saved the other person instead it would have been the same. You can’t know. And even if you could see the future and know perfectly what outcome your choices would have, there’s no such thing as a perfect choice. Someone’s going to get hurt. Something is going to end up less than ideal no matter what you choose. Maybe if you save one guy, he dies in a car accident a month later. Maybe the other guy lives to be a hundred. Is the first guy’s month of life less valuable? What if he spent it doing charity work in Africa? Is he more valuable then? What if the second guy has a big family? What if they both have families? Does having four kids make someone more important than if they only had one? It’s impossible to make the right choice because there is no right choice, ever. There’s no wrong choices either. You just do the best you can with what’s in front of you. You try to cause the least pain you can and you understand that the rest is out of your control. You know this.”

Jack was still just staring miserably into his drink. He looked up as Otis finished, meeting his eye, his own brimming with frustrated confusion.

“But then what’s the point?” he asked. “Why bother at all if it doesn’t make a difference?”

“Because we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t try,” Otis replied. “It’s in our nature to try and change things we can’t control. And it’s not like we never succeed. It’s not always hopeless lost causes. Anderson’s dad is alive because of you. You pulled him out of his house during the floods. And Deckker’s sister-in-law. You found her after her car wrecked during that blizzard. Her kids would be orphans without you.”

“What about all the people I didn’t save?” Jack asked. “The people I could have saved and chose not to? Because I chose to save someone else, or because I decided the time and resources were better spent somewhere else? What if I wasn’t making the best possible decision and I was letting stupid bias or jealousies affect my choice? Is it still not my fault when I might have saved someone, but I decided not to?”

Otis considered that for a long moment, and finally shook his head.

“I don’t know my friend,” he concluded. “I just don’t know. I’ll get you another drink and maybe we’ll figure it out by the morning.”

He stood up and went to get them another round, leaving Jack to contemplate his empty glass and the guilt that troubled him. What he’d done to Calder, what he’d done with Calder, everything that had happened with Brian and Marna and how he’d avoided it afterwards—it all swirled together into a miasma of shame he didn’t know how to deal with. He’d thought telling Calder the truth was the right decision, but maybe it was just too late to make things right. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe it was better that he push Calder away now, before things got any more complicated than they already were.

Jack returned to the cabin, stumbling drunk, much later. It must have been close to three in the morning. He climbed into bed, half expecting Calder to be there. But the bed was empty. Calder was downstairs on the couch, silent as Jack loudly fumbled through getting his boots off.

Later still, as he lay sleepless, he heard the other man sobbing in the silence below him. Good, he thought. Crying was good. Maybe he was finally letting himself grieve. The urge to go down and hold him was strong, but Jack ignored it. It was more than Avery's death Calder needed to accept. Jack, thinking about the warmth of the other man's body, needed to accept it too. What they were to each other was as temporary as the snow, and would vanish as soon as spring came and their usefulness to each other had expired.