The Way Past Winter

thanks always to my family. To my mother, who reads every draft and answers every panicked phone call. To my father, who shows me the wild edges of the world and tells me to keep writing into them.

The boy smiled. “I knew you saw. You care, Mila, deeply, and that makes you pay attention. There are things in the world that you have to look at with more than your eyes, hear with more than your ears, touch with more than your fingers.

Stories are just another way of telling the truth. And here she was—at the heart of the story, where it mingled with truth. She decided to believe.

home Mila’s view of the heavens was obscured by trees—slices of sky with trees overlaid like fingers over her eyes. But here it felt as if she were in a giant upended bowl, perforated with light. From horizon to horizon, she could see stars, and there, to what must be the north, something glassy shimmered. The frozen Boreal Sea.

ching sound. “You’re so soft, Mila.”
Mila flushed, but Mama’s warm hand enclosed hers, and she brought her head down as close as she could to Mila’s ear, so only she could hear. “My Milenka,” she whispered. “The softest of us all—and so the strongest.”