The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.

The natural-born predator could seem domesticated, even friendly, could lick your throat affectionately or rub up against you to get a back scratch. But you knew, or should know, that it was a wild thing you lived with, that a collar and leash and a bowl of food might tame the actions of the beast, but couldn’t change its essential nature. In a split second, less time than it took to exhale a breath, that wolf could claim its nature and turn, fangs bared.

Her fear and anxiety about the world had been sharpened to a knifepoint.

Like so many sins, the snow covered it all.

Hope. A shiny thing, a lure for the unwary.

She felt him leave her behind, journey into the landscape of dark, thorny memories. Then she felt him come back.

In the naïveté of youth, her parents had seemed like towering presences, omnipotent and all-knowing. But they weren’t that; they were just two broken people.

This grief was unlike any emotion she’d experienced before, suffocating, weighty. It pulled the color from everything.

SUCH A THIN VEIL separated the past from the present; they existed simultaneously in the human heart.