A Matter of Trust(66)

Her. Himself. God.

“I had no business praying like I did today.”

His words rattled through her.

She understood Gage better than he thought. Because one look at herself told her that she had some audacity to think God would listen to her, let alone grant her requests.

Gage made some quick cuts down the ridgeline to slow them, his body smooth as liquid.

She fell into the rhythm, nearly on his track but not quite.

Her own words came back to her about God, you messed up, but that doesn’t mean I did. Trust me. She wasn’t sure where they’d come from, but they lingered, hung on.

Maybe that was the key—just because she’d made a mistake with her life didn’t mean that God had, and it hopefully didn’t change the way God saw her.

Still flawed but worth loving anyway.

And if God loved her despite her failures, maybe she could let go of trying to control everything, start trusting him.

Please, God, let my brother be okay.

Gage paused at the top of the chute, the right flank of the cave. “We’ll just slide our way down this—it’s pretty steep at the bottom, and we don’t want to overshoot the cave.”

She had a feeling that if he were alone, he might just ride straight down, but she didn’t argue with him. He angled his board parallel to the fall line and skidded down the nearly vertical chute, following it down to a steep white field at the base.

“Hey! There are tracks down here!”

She followed him down, maybe too fast because she nearly flew by him. Powder flumed as she skidded to a stop.

He raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything about her wild descent. Then he pointed to a thick white line leading out of the cave and down the mountain.

“Is that one track or two?”

“I don’t know.” But he was unbuckling his boots from the bindings. “Let’s check the cave.”

She unclipped her bindings, settled her board in the snow, and hiked up.

Facing eastward, the cave was, indeed, difficult to see, especially from their route. The sun gilded the ice around the edges and cast light into the opening, a small oval that she had to drop to her knees to crawl into.

Gage had already climbed inside and turned on his head lamp, illuminating the cave’s interior. Maybe it had once been filled with water, because the edges were grooved with lines and the floor was a smooth, polished granite.

Dry and tall enough for her to stand, the cave tunneled back into the rock. The main cavern rose around her and dipped into a dry pool before it narrowed into small tunnels in the back.

In the middle of the pool sat an orange two-man tent. A snowboard lay beside the tent, a pair of boots outside the door.

“Ollie!”

Ella scrambled over to the tent, right behind Gage, who’d knelt to open the door.

He grabbed her arm a moment before she barreled inside.

The figure lay on his unrolled sleeping bag, one arm flung up over his eyes. He was dressed in a thermal shirt and fleece pants. Nearby lay the debris of his gear—snow pants, jacket, and a helmet smashed in on one side.

His right leg lay elevated on a rolled-up sleeping bag.

His knee looked the size of a soccer ball. The fleece pants had been ripped open to accommodate the swelling, but judging by the redness and the swelling at his ankle, he’d landed wrong, and hard.

Worse, the leg had taken on a dark purple hue.

“Oh my gosh, Ollie!”

With a start, the man moved his arm down. Lifted his head. He had dark hair and was a little taller than Ollie, which her brain had skipped right over.

“Bradley,” Gage said. “What happened?”

She couldn’t move, not sure what she felt. Relief? Horror? Disappointment?

Maybe all of it as she watched Gage move into the tent. “When did this happen?”

Bradley looked dehydrated, and he moaned as he lifted himself up on his elbows. He stared at them as if he didn’t recognize them.

“It’s me, Ella. And you’ve met my friend Gage. He’s an EMT.”

Gage was already slinging down his pack, reaching for the water. He held Bradley’s head, gave him a sip.

Bradley grabbed the water and drank until Gage pulled it away. “Ease up, pal. Not too much, too fast.”

Bradley wiped his mouth, his eyes thick with pain. “I fell coming down the Great White Throne. Bounced all the way down, landed . . . well, you can see. I think my knee might be out of socket. I can’t move it at all. And my ankle is probably busted. I turned it inside my boot.”

Gage was probing, very gently, the mass that was his knee. “How’d you get here?”

“Ollie carried me on his back. Rode most of the way, and then when it got too hard, he made me get on my board and we slid down together.”