A Long Dark Night – Lilli Sutton (1)

It wasn’t too late—he could get up now, pull the remote from his father’s hands, and force him to talk. Unspool the dark presence of his misery that had hung, cloudlike, over this house since the day he shattered his leg. But Grant knew it was useless. Mushing had been his entire life, and with that gone, with a leg that never healed right and a body that no longer stood up to the rigors of hours on a dogsled, Ted Sanford believed he had nothing left to live for.

The dogs in the kennel existed only as dreams, as projections for the future. Grant knew his father had still held hope when he bred Wilder’s litter, when his mother was still driving him to weekly physical therapy sessions in Fairbanks after his surgery. But it was too late. He hadn’t been able to go for an entire winter, trapped by the ferocious snow, the impassable Dalton. By spring his leg had healed wrong and the physical therapist could only try to help him in his limited range of mobility.

Grant remembered how his father’s anger had boiled over that summer, his rage burning white-hot through every room in the tiny house. Grant was working at Brooks Valley by then and spent as little time at home as possible. In those days, he’d been glad that both Nina and Audrey were gone. Now he tried to imagine what Audrey would have done had she been there— probably thrown her own plate at the wall, shown their father the childish nature of his actions.

Demanded that he apologize and start acting like an adult. But he couldn’t know for sure; she hadn’t eaten a meal at their house in years. Sometimes the generational divide between himself and his father felt as clean as a knife slicing through whitefish. Ted had made his living off the land, hunting and fishing and raising champion sled dogs.

His family had lived without running water, without electricity, without plumbing. Everything had shifted rapidly after Grant was born.

Nina didn’t recognize the man in the yard. She stopped a few feet back from where the floodlights reached midway down the driveway, where the line of white light melted into harsh shadow. Maybe her family had sold the house and never bothered to tell her. Years had passed since she last received one of her mother’s letters. And Grant—he would have told her, she hoped, but she had no idea how he felt about her now or how he would have contacted her.

By leaving, she had planted a seed of resentment— maybe it had slowly grown all these years, morphed into something worse than she dared to imagine. The old sign still stood at the end of the driveway, TED SANFORD’S SLED DOGS carved into the wood, but years of relentless wind and snow had left it barely legible. Maybe the new owners hadn’t even bothered to tear it down. She needed to make a decision. Head into town, try to find someone she recognized, or try her luck with the unfamiliar man.

At least he lived in Whitespur. He could point her in the right direction, tell her where her family lived now. Even if they’d left home, there was no way they’d left Whitespur. But she had to be careful. The man was chopping wood with an axe, each decisive swing splitting a log in half with a sharp crack. She didn’t want to startle him. He tossed the split pieces into a pile and replaced them with another log in a smooth rhythm.

Preparing for winter, because even though it was October, autumn was the final inhale before cold and darkness settled over interior Alaska. She took a step forward at the same moment the man dropped the axe and crossed the yard to the kennel, bending forward to talk to the penned dog, who had alerted to her presence several minutes ago.

With a jolt she recognized the man in profile. Like her father in old pictures from his competitive days, grinning from the runners of a dogsled after winning yet another long-distance race, he was bearded and broad-shouldered. But this man wasn’t her father. He was her baby brother, Grant, fifteen when she left, twenty-four now, remade into an entirely new person.

Nina couldn’t believe she hadn’t registered the obvious truth. That nine years was a long time, that of course Grant wouldn’t have remained frozen in time. Still—she didn’t know him, didn’t know how he would react to her presence again.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 5e08dcba29d1b087
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,612,434 bytes (2.491 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 263
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 459.79 minutes
• Total Words: 91,958
• Total Characters: 510,926
• Average Words per Page: 349.65
• Average Characters per Page: 1942.68

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