The thermometer nailed beside the back porch read -35°F.
The wind made it worse.
It cut across the valley like a blade sharpened on ice, driving snow in hard white sheets over the barns, fences, and dark pine ridges beyond town. The kind of cold that didn’t just bite exposed skin—it reached through fabric, through muscle, straight into bone. The kind of cold old-timers talked about in quiet voices, the kind that could turn a wrong turn into a death sentence.
Evelyn had lived in Montana her whole life. She had skinned deer with numb fingers, shoveled roofs after Christmas storms, and once driven twenty miles on black ice to get her husband to the ER when he split his hand open on a snowblower blade.
She knew cold.
This was different.
This was a killer.
