She remembered in detail the evening she had left home. Eleanor Dawson had stood on the porch in an old faded housecoat, hands on hips. Her voice had cut like an ax—sharp, angry, absolute.
“Valerie, have you lost your mind? What kind of life is that? Running off into the woods with strangers?”
“You’re twenty years old! Look at Nancy next door—married, expecting, building a real life. And you? You throw on a backpack and head for some muddy wilderness?”
Young and hotheaded, Valerie had said something cruel back. Something hard enough that her mother physically flinched. The exact words had long since blurred, but the feeling remained.
It was sharp as broken glass in the throat. Valerie regretted those words an hour later, then a day later, then years later. But she never called to say so.
Pride. Stubbornness. And now here she was, lying in a swamp gully, pregnant, exhausted, with medicinal maggots on her leg, thinking about that old fight.
Mom was right about one thing, she thought through the fever. I did end up in the woods.
Then she said out loud, firm and clear, “No. Not like this.”
The morning of the fifth day was cold and raw. Valerie woke shaking. The rain had stopped, but the air had turned chilly, and large drops of condensation slid down the inside of the windows.
She forced herself upright. The world swam. Her hands shook—not from fear now, but from exhaustion and dehydration. She tried to stand and her knees buckled. She fell back onto the seat.
There was only a swallow of rainwater left in the bottle. No food at all. Her stomach had stopped cramping from hunger. She checked her leg again: the wound was clean. The larvae had done their job beautifully.
But dehydration and starvation were taking over. The baby moved only once that whole morning, weakly. “Please,” Valerie whispered through cracked lips. “Please let help get here.”
She didn’t know who she was talking to. God, the woods, Ruth Miller, anybody. Around ten in the morning, through the haze of near-fainting, she heard something.
At first she thought she imagined it. Wind in the trees. A bird call. Hallucinations happen with dehydration; she knew that. But a minute later the sound came again, clearer this time.
A steady crunch of dry branches under heavy boots. Human footsteps.
Valerie gathered what little strength she had and tried to shout. Only a rough rasp came out. She swallowed, drew in air, and tried again.
“Down here!” she called, but her voice came out thin and weak. Realizing no one would hear that, she grabbed the empty plastic bottle and began banging it against the metal roof of the SUV.
She hit it in a steady rhythm. The hollow metallic sound rang through the gully.
The footsteps above quickened at once and headed her way. Branches cracked. Then a man’s voice boomed from above.
“Hey! Anybody down there?”
“Here!” Valerie shouted with everything she had left, tears spilling down her face. “I’m here! Down here!”
Seconds later a face appeared over the edge of the bank. Broad, bearded, weathered. A large man in a camouflage jacket and chest waders, a hunting rifle slung over one shoulder.
He looked down, saw the wrecked SUV on its side, and then saw the woman inside—mud-covered, gaunt, pale, and very pregnant.
