The farmhouse where Ellie dragged him was somebody else's life. Photographs still on the walls, a child's drawing pinned above the fireplace with a nail someone had put there with intention. Joel lay on the floor of other people's warmth and bled into the boards and thought about nothing in particular, which was the only mercy his body had left to offer him.

He had taken a rebar through the side. He had lived through worse. He could not remember what was worse but he was certain it existed, and certainty was the only form of optimism still available to him. Ellie had packed the wound with what she could find. She had done it without instructions, without practice, without asking whether he wanted her to. That was the part he kept returning to: she hadn't asked.

Outside the window, the first real snowfall of the season was coming down. Not the gray slush that passed for snow in the early months but actual snow, the kind that Sarah used to run into barefoot before anyone could stop her, the kind that stuck to eyelashes and made the world briefly forgivable. Joel watched it through cracked glass and tried to remember the last time he had let anything feel like that.

Twenty years. It had been twenty years since he had been responsible for someone who wasn't already capable of being responsible for themselves. He had avoided it deliberately, systematically, with the same care he applied to every decision that kept him moving forward instead of sideways. And now there was a fourteen-year-old girl outside in the cold, hunting something for dinner, keeping him alive through sheer refusal to accept the alternative. He owed her a debt he had not agreed to carry, and it was already too heavy to put down.