Page 80 of Wild Heart

The words hung in the air like frost.

Natalie swallowed hard. “Is she…?”

He couldn’t say it. He didn’t have to. Natalie closed her eyes, and her face crumpled. A breath escaped her like something vital leaving her chest. She held the baby tighter.

Davey finally moved. He stepped forward and stood at the foot of the bed, his hands open and shaking. “They haven’t found her yet. Not officially. But they found the ledge. The rocks. Her pack. The trail's gone.”

Natalie reached for Mason’s hand, and he folded into her, their foreheads pressed together, the baby a warm weight between them. A small sound, a sob, escaped Natalie’s lips, muffled into Mason’s shoulder. And Davey, he sat on the other side of the bed, head bowed. His hands trembling. His lips parted like he wanted to say something but didn’t know how to begin.

Then, a small movement. The baby’s tiny fingers curled around Mason’s index finger, holding it like a lifeline. And on the other hand, reaching blindly, she grasped one of Davey’s fingers, too. That’s how they stayed. The three of them. Mason weeping quietly, Natalie holding her daughter to her heart, Davey watching the baby’s hand curl around his own with something like reverence breaking through the storm of grief.

They didn’t speak. There was nothing more to say. The world had changed shape again, sudden, brutal, irreversible. But somehow, in the center of that loss, there was also this.

A new life. A tether. A daughter. A sister. A light.

Mason kissed Natalie’s temple. “She’s holding both of us,” he whispered.

Natalie looked down, tears tracing her cheeks, her voice rough. “She’s holding all of us.”

Davey reached forward and rested his hand on the baby’s back. And together, in that quiet hospital room where grief met grace, they breathed in what remained. Outside, the clouds parted just enough to let a sliver of sunlight fall across the hospital floor. Pale and gold, it stretched toward the bed like a reaching hand, catching the edge of the white cotton blanket and the curve of the newborn’s sleeping face.

Her hands were still wrapped around both Mason’s and Davey’s fingers, tiny fists holding tightly, like she could anchor them in that quiet, impossible space between joy and sorrow.

Natalie looked down at her daughter, the tears still fresh on her cheeks, her throat sore from holding back what her heart was trying to speak.

The baby moved softly against her chest, a warm breath, a flutter of lashes, a gentle flex of fingers.

“She’s so small,” Natalie whispered, more to herself than to anyone else. Her voice was thick with exhaustion and grief and something more fragile than hope.

And then Natalie exhaled. Long and slow. As if naming her sorrow would somehow ease it. She looked at the child, still unnamed, still new, and felt the heat rise again in her chest.

A memory passed through her, unbidden. Olivia’s voice, crisp and steady in her ear just weeks before:"Names matter. They tell the story before we get the chance."

Natalie touched the baby’s cheek with the backs of her fingers. Her lips trembled as she whispered, “Her name is Livvy.”

Davey looked up sharply. Mason blinked, and for a moment, he didn’t breathe.

“Olivia,” Natalie said softly, meeting Mason’s eyes. “But… Livvy. For what she gave us. For what we lost. And what we still have.”

The name settled into the room like it had always belonged there.

Livvy.

The baby stirred, her tiny brow furrowing just slightly, and then she yawned, her mouth opening in a perfect pink O before she nestled deeper into Natalie’s chest.

Davey let out a choked breath, his eyes wet. “It suits her,” he said.

“It’s perfect,” Mason added, his voice low, reverent.

Natalie nodded. “She’ll carry Olivia forward. In name. In spirit. In the way she moves through the world.”

For a long while, none of them spoke again. They just sat. Watching her. Holding her. Letting the weight of the name, the life, the loss, settle into something real. And outside the hospital window, the world, fragile, bruised, and beginning again, kept turning.

34

A month had passed since the night the storm changed everything. The days that followed had not arrived in the tidy, measured way the calendar suggested they would. They had dragged, twisted, folded into each other, like time itself was grieving too. Sometimes the light came in warm and sure, falling through the windows of the sanctuary like old memory. Other times, the hours passed in muted gray, everything shrouded in that strange silence that follows death, when even nature dares not make a sound, as if it knows a soul has gone.

Autumn had crept in slowly, hesitant, reverent. The birches along the southern trail had just begun to yellow, their golden leaves fluttering like quiet applause with each breeze. Mornings were cool now, sharp with the bite of frost clinging to the grass, and nights descended earlier, with stars slipping into view like small, watchful eyes.

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