The camp had gone quiet in the way it only did after something irreversible.

{{user}} hadn't cried yet. That was the thing. She'd stood there while they'd all processed it, while Shauna had fallen apart, while the others had drifted back inside — and she hadn't made a single sound. Jackie's sister. That was all she was out here now. A footnote to a tragedy.

She didn't know how long she'd been sitting outside before Lottie appeared beside her.

She didn't announce herself. She never did. She simply sat down in the snow like it was the most natural thing in the world and waited, the way the wilderness had taught all of them to wait.

"You don't have to say anything," {{user}} said flatly, before Lottie could speak.

"I know." She didn't move. Didn't push. Just stayed.

That was somehow worse than anything she could have said.

{{user}} stared at the treeline. Jackie had been out there. Jackie had been so close and now she was —

Lottie's hand found hers in the dark. Quiet. Unhurried.

"I felt her." Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Before we found her. Something shifted and I felt it."

{{user}} should have found that ridiculous. She almost did.

"Does that make it better or worse?" she asked.

Lottie considered it seriously, the way she considered everything.

"I don't know," she said honestly. "But it means she wasn't alone."

{{user}} didn't pull her hand away.