My Christmas Winter’s Mate

Chapter 3

I ran through the snow with the wind slicing at my skin, each gust a knife against my face, each breath scraping like broken glass down my throat. Tears froze against my cheeks, turning to ice before they could fall, the cold sealing them like wounds unable to bleed. I didn’t feel my body anymore; only the need to keep moving, to outrun the devastation tearing itself open inside me. The only truth I carried was brutal in its simplicity: I had to vanish. I had to dissolve into nothing, become a ghost among strangers, disappear in a place where no one knew my name, where promises could no longer reach me, where Christmas lights would never again be bright enough to blind me. I needed silence. Oblivion. Darkness. Anything but the world I was leaving behind.

I didn’t go back to the office. I couldn’t walk through those doors pretending to breathe. Instead, I opened my email with hands stiff and numb from the cold and grief, fingers trembling as if my bones were shaking inside my skin. I typed my resignation in the subject line: Effective immediately. Do not contact me again. I pressed send without reading it, without giving myself the chance to hesitate, because it felt like tearing off the last thread tying me to a life already dead. It felt like cutting the cord to a body that no longer belonged to me.

I threw my access badge into a trash bin on the corner of Fifth Avenue, watching it disappear beneath dirty snow and crushed paper cups and half-eaten pretzels. It felt disturbingly like watching a burial. The hollow clink of plastic landing against metal echoed like the sound of a coffin lid closing. I kept walking—hours and hours, blocks and blocks, without direction, without breath, without anything to hold on to—until night drained away into a muted, washed-out morning. Dawn arrived like a punishment, gray and unkind, shining light on everything I wished I could erase. By then, my voice was gone entirely, ripped raw from sobbing until there was nothing left inside me to break.

I stopped under the awning of a closed bakery, shivering so hard my bones felt like they were rattling apart. I had no plan, no reason, no sense of where to go or what version of myself would still exist in the next hour. I pulled out my phone with frozen fingers and opened the airline app, scrolling through destinations without thinking, staring through the blur of my vision. I expected nothing. I hoped for nothing. I was an empty shell inside a frozen city.

And then a word appeared on the screen—a single word that felt like a pulse beneath ice:

Alaska.

Far. White. Merciless.

A land that swallows sound and buries the past beneath endless snow.

A place where everything dies and is reborn under a brutal sky.

A place wild enough to silence the screaming inside my chest.

But that wasn’t what made my heart twist.

It was the sudden thought of my mother—her voice on the phone a few days ago, small and tired, asking if I’d come for Christmas. The memory of her hands stroking my hair when I was a child and didn’t know yet how sharp the world could be. The thought of her alone, waiting in a frozen land, carrying her grief in silence. The ache that surged inside me was sharper than the cold.

For the first time since the night shattered, something like clarity cut through the fog—raw and painful, but real. Maybe the universe wasn’t trying to bury me alive. Maybe it was pushing me back to the only person left who had ever loved me without conditions.

I pressed BOOK FLIGHT with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. Departure in three hours. No luggage. No goodbyes. No explanations. Only escape—bloody and desperate, but mine.

The confirmation email appeared on the screen, and a wave of exhaustion washed over me, heavy and final, like a door slamming shut on the old world. I was going to Alaska. To my mother. To survive one more day. To leave behind the worst Christmas of my life and the ruins of the person I used to be.

I stood there beneath the frozen morning light, letting the decision anchor itself deep inside my bones like a steel rod driven through ice. All I knew was this: that night, I buried the woman who believed in promises and miracles, the woman who waited, who trusted, who hoped. She died on a hotel floor under the glow of Christmas lights, drowned beneath betrayal and winter.

And in the quiet emptiness she left behind, I took my first step toward the darkness waiting for me beyond the snow—toward whatever version of myself would claw her way out of the ashes.

I bought the first plane ticket I could find, without thinking, driven only by the desperate need to run—run so far that nothing and no one could ever find me again. From the airport, I took a bus that cut through snow-covered roads toward a small mountain town, where I would transfer to another bus that would take me to a remote cabin I’d found through a house-exchange website.

You should think before you act, I scolded myself silently as I rested my forehead against the frozen glass of the window.

I didn’t regret ending things with Adam—though I did regret the way I handled it. That lie disguised as a perfect relationship had ripped me away from who I was, from my life, from emotional stability. People I had worked with for years—people I thought respected and valued me—had turned their backs on me the moment they learned the truth. They accused me of things that weren’t true, defending Adam as if he were some misunderstood hero.

To hell with all of them.

At twenty-four, I was done tolerating humiliation and cheap explanations. I had thrown everything away—my job, my routine, my city… a life I once believed was solid. But in the end, it had been nothing more than thin paper, ready to tear apart with the slightest pressure.

I stared through the bus window as it carried me deeper into the snow-covered mountains of Alaska; I couldn’t have found a more distant place to disappear. They would think I was hiding. Maybe I was. I didn’t care.

The bus wasn’t full—maybe fifteen people total, all sitting toward the front. I had settled into the very last seat, trying to avoid being trapped with some chatty stranger. For some reason, seeing a woman alone triggered an urge in certain men to begin pointless conversations, trying to play romantic heroes. I wasn’t in the mood for any of it.

Outside, the world turned whiter with every mile, a landscape of endless ice. I liked the cold, but maybe this time I had gone too far. I was running from everything—from Manhattan, from Christmas, from memories, from myself.

The holidays had always been a quiet torture. I never had a family to celebrate with. I grew up in foster homes, surrounded by people who never stayed long enough to love me. Christmas always made me feel like an outsider. Adam had known that. And still, he managed to make me hate it even more.

I remembered his breathless voice in that hotel bed, his hands on another woman’s skin, the wedding ring glinting on the finger of the wife I never knew existed. I remembered his silence—that knife-sharp way he let me die without saying a word.

How could I have been so stupid, I murmured inwardly.

I was lost in my thoughts when a violent crash shook the bus. A sharp, brutal impact slammed us sideways. I lost my balance and my head struck the frozen window with such force that white stars exploded behind my eyes. I tried to grab the back of the seat, but my body was thrown forward, smashing into the seat ahead.

I pressed a hand to my head.

Warm blood slid between my fingers.

“What… the hell?” I whispered, dazed.

I blinked rapidly, trying to focus. The front of the bus was no longer recognizable—it was a twisted mass of crushed metal and shattered glass. Silence swallowed everything. Half the seats were gone.

An accident.

A sharp chemical smell burned into my lungs—fuel.

Oh, s**t.

If we didn’t get out fast, we would burn alive.

I pushed myself to my feet, swaying, gripping the seatbacks to stay upright.

“Get out!” I shouted, though my voice was nothing more than a broken rasp.

No answer.

I stepped forward—and stopped cold.

Two bodies were still seated, completely motionless, their necks twisted at unnatural angles. I checked their pulse even though I already knew.

“My God…” I whispered, my voice made of ashes.

If they had died like that—almost untouched—those in the front had no chance at all.

Between the wreckage, something moved.

A truck had plowed into the bus, the cab crushed into it like a fist. And inside, a man was still breathing.

I didn’t think. I just moved.

I climbed out through a broken gap in the side of the bus, stumbling awkwardly onto the ice. I hit my hip hard but forced myself up. I ran to the truck, climbed onto the twisted step, and leaned through the shattered window.

“Sir! I’m going to try to open the door!” I shouted through ragged breaths.

He looked up at me. A huge gash split his forehead, blood streaming without stopping.

“I’m stuck…” he murmured.

I pulled on the door with everything I had, but it barely moved.

“It’s off the hinge,” he explained, trying to push from the inside. “I called for help on the radio. They’ll be here soon.”

I tore off my scarf and handed it to him.

“Press hard. Stop the bleeding.”

“Thank you. But you should get away.”

“I’m not leaving you. On the bus… there’s no one left alive.”

The man closed his eyes, devastated.

“s**t… I couldn’t control it… there was ice…”

Without warning, a small flame flickered beneath the bus.

The gasoline had ignited.

“Girl, go,” he ordered, suddenly firm.

“I’ll try the other side—” I insisted.

“Get away! NOW!” he roared, shoving me with brutal strength.

I fell backward onto the snow, and before I could stand I heard his scream:

“RUN!”

A second later, the explosion swallowed everything.

A wave of scorching heat blasted me backward. The sky erupted into orange and red, the roar deafening, the light blinding. I hit the ice hard—my body went numb, my vision blurred. The flames danced in front of my eyes until they slowly dimmed.

And just before everything turned black, one thought whispered through me:

Maybe dying like this would be easier than living with a broken heart.

Then the world vanished.