It rose above the town like a wall of ice and stone, sharp against the January sky, its upper ridges buried under snow that never seemed to melt. The locals said the mountain made its own weather. They said storms appeared there out of clear blue air. They said more people got humbled on Blackthorn than anywhere else in the county.
At that moment, I believed all of it.
I also believed, with the hard certainty that only hunger gives you, that a mountain was still more honest than people.
My name is Caleb Mercer. I was twenty-six years old that winter, broke enough to count pennies by touch in the dark, and homeless enough to judge a town by which awnings blocked the wind best after midnight. I had spent the last six months drifting west after losing everything that used to make my life look normal from the outside—my apartment in Tulsa, my welding job, my truck, and finally my pride in clean, humiliating installments.
People always want a clean story about how a man ends up with nothing. They want one mistake, one weakness, one dramatic downfall they can point to and say, That’s where he went wrong.
Life wasn’t kind enough to make it that simple for me.
My mother got sick in the spring. Lung cancer. By June I was missing work to take her to appointments. By August the company had cut my hours. By September she was gone, and I had more hospital debt in my name than I made in a year. I started drinking too much, then sleeping too little, then showing up late and angry to a job that had already decided I was replaceable.
