The storm pounded the Rockies like a living thing the night four-year-old Eli Parker pressed his face to a frost-covered window and whispered into the dark, “I just want someone to love me.”
Inside the old mountainside cabin, the fire had long died, leaving only biting cold and the echo of Deborah Whitlock’s cruel voice. Eli had known pain before he could even name it. His mother had died when he was two. His father, Daniel, had remarried, and the new wife, Deborah, was prettier than she was kind. Left alone during his father’s long mining shifts, Eli had become a shadow in his own home—every slip, every mistake punished with words meant to wound.
That night, a spilled glass of milk became the final straw. Deborah’s slap landed like fire on his cheek. Humiliated and desperate, Eli did the only thing a child without hope could imagine: he fled into the blizzard. Barefoot, in thin pajamas, snow cutting into his skin, he trudged uphill toward Timberline Ridge, a place whispered to be haunted, cursed, dangerous.
At the ridge, a faint lantern glowed in the storm. Inside the cabin, seventy-three-year-old Rose Miller stirred soup. Decades alone had hardened her heart after losing her husband and only son. But the soft scratching at her door, followed by the small, frost-covered sob, awakened something long buried.
Eli collapsed into her arms. “I just wanted someone to love me,” he managed to whisper.
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