He stopped, just stopped the first woman's hand, her right hand, the one closest to her sister, was locked around the other woman's wrist, not resting, not fallen there by accident, locked. Fingers curled and frozen in position. Ice-white knuckles grip that must have been deliberate before the cold took her strength. She had reached across and held on, and held on, and held on until she couldn't anymore. Hadley Cross had buried a wife and a child in the same year.
He knew what it looked like when someone refused to let go. He sat back on his heels in the snow and just breathed. For a moment, then he stood up and got to work. Getting both women onto Rex was not elegant, or simple, or anything close to easy. The first woman, the one who'd been holding on, was rigid from cold.
Her limbs stiff in ways that made every movement feel precarious. Hadley worked slowly, carefully, talking to Rex in a low, steady voice to keep the horse calm. Talking to the women, too, even though neither could hear him, just filling the air with something human because the silence felt wrong. Easy. Easy now.
I've got you. Just stay with me. He'd said those words before, different voice, different person, different outcome. He pushed the memory down and focused on the task. The second woman stirred when he lifted her.
Eyes cracking open just a sliver, dark, unfocused, filled with the confusion of someone being pulled back from somewhere very far away. She couldn't speak, but her fingers moved, searching. "Your sister's already on the horse," Hadley said. "She's right there. You can hear her breathing."
He wasn't sure if that was true, but he said it anyway because people need something to hold on to when they're going under. The ride back to the cabin took 40 minutes in the storm. 40 minutes of Rex picking his footing through deepening drifts. 40 minutes of Hadley leaning forward one arm around the women to keep them upright shielding them from the worst of the wind with his own body. The temperature was dropping.
He could feel it in his face that numbness that starts at the cheekbones and works inward. He talked the whole way not to them not to Rex either just out loud narrating nothing in particular. The barn is about a mile. The snow's letting up a little. See that?
Little bit. Wind's shifting west. That's something. It wasn't really about the words. It was about keeping something alive in himself as much as in them.
The cabin materialized through the white like a thought you'd forgotten you had just there suddenly dark walls against gray sky smoke from the chimney. He'd banked the fire before he left. Habit always banked the fire and the sight of that smoke hit Hadley somewhere in his chest. He'd never been so glad to see his own home. He dismounted at the door and carried them in one at a time, in both arms, the way you carry something fragile and irreplaceable.