PART 1: THE BOY WHO DISAPPEARED

The sliding glass doors of the gas station didn’t swoosh shut; they rattled. I can still hear that sound. It’s the soundtrack to the moment my life split into Before and After.

I stood by the magazine rack, pretending to read a copy of Field & Stream, but my eyes were glued to the asphalt parking lot. The sun was setting, turning the oil stains on the concrete into shimmering, toxic rainbows. My hand was sweating around the twenty-dollar bill she’d pressed into my palm.

“Wait right here, Jaime. Twenty minutes, tops.”

Her fingers had lingered for a second. A heartbeat too long. That was the tell, wasn’t it? Adults always have a tell. She smiled, but her eyes… her eyes were already miles away, speeding down the interstate without me.

One hour passed. Then two. The clerk, a woman with hair the color of cigarette ash and eyes that had seen too much, started watching me. I saw her reach for the phone. I knew what that meant. Police. Foster care. The system. I wasn’t going back to the system.

I slipped out the back door just as the fluorescent lights flickered on. I didn’t run. Running attracts attention. I walked, shoulders hunched, invisible. Just another kid taking a shortcut behind the dumpsters. That’s where I met him.

He was shivering amidst the garbage—a scrappy, ugly mutt with one ear torn halfway off and ribs that looked like the rungs of a broken ladder. He growled low in his throat, a warning, but his tail gave a single, hesitant thump against a discarded burger wrapper.

“Hey,” I whispered, my voice cracking. “You got left behind too?”

I tore off a piece of the sandwich I’d shoplifted earlier—my first crime—and tossed it to him. He swallowed it whole, then looked at me with eyes that held the same terrifying question I felt in my own chest: What now?

“I’m Jaime,” I told him. “And you look like a Scout.”

He pressed his wet nose against my hand. In that cold, grease-smelling alley, we made a pact without saying a word. We were a pack of two against a world that didn’t want us.

We walked for days. I didn’t have a plan, just an instinct pulling me west, toward the blue ridges rising like bruised knuckles on the horizon. I’d heard truckers talking about the mountains. “Places so deep in the hollers not even God looks there,” one had said. That sounded perfect. I wanted to be where God, the police, and social workers couldn’t find me.

Survival wasn’t like the movies. It was dirty, cold, and smelled like fear. We slept in culverts that stank of runoff and dead leaves. I learned to wash in gas station sinks, scrubbing the grime from my neck while Scout guarded the door. The twenty dollars dwindled with agonizing slowness—a second-hand jacket, a knife from a pawn shop that didn’t ask for ID, a box of matches.

But the mountains… they called to me. As the asphalt turned to gravel, and gravel to dirt, the air changed. It stopped smelling like exhaust and started smelling like pine resin and damp earth.

It was late October when we found it.

We had pushed deep into the wilderness, following a game trail that wound up a ridge so steep my calves burned with every step. The mist was thick that morning, clinging to the trees like ghosts. Scout stopped suddenly, his hackles rising. He let out a sharp bark and darted through a thicket of mountain laurel.

“Scout! Wait!” I scrambled after him, thorns tearing at my jeans.

I burst through the brush and froze.

There, nestled in a small, bowl-shaped clearing surrounded by ancient pines, stood a cabin. Or, the corpse of one.

The roof sagged like a broken spine. The windows were gaping black mouths, devoid of glass. The porch listed dangerously to the left. It was gray, weathered, and rotting. To anyone else, it would have looked like garbage. A ruin to be bulldozed.

But I didn’t see the rot. I saw walls. I saw a chimney. I saw a place where the wind couldn’t get me.

“Is this it, boy?” I whispered.

Scout trotted up the sagging steps, his nails clicking on the wood. He turned and looked at me, tongue lolling. Welcome home.

The first night was terrifying. The cabin groaned. It wasn’t just settling; it sounded like it was in pain. The wind whistled through the gaps between the logs, singing a lonely, mournful song. We huddled in the corner near the stone fireplace, which was choked with debris. I had managed to clear a small spot, and we lay on my thin sleeping bag, Scout’s body acting as a living heater against my back.

Every snap of a twig outside sounded like a footstep. Was it a bear? A mountain lion? Or worse—a sheriff with a flashlight?

But morning came. And with it, the realization of just how screwed we were.

We were starving. My stomach felt like it was digesting itself. The woods were beautiful, yes—vast cathedrals of green and gold light—but you can’t eat scenery.

“We need food,” I told Scout. He looked at me expectantly.

I had a fishing line I’d found in a drawer, a rusty hook, and zero idea how to use them. I spent three days standing by the creek, shivering, watching trout ignore my clumsy bait. I cursed. I cried. I threw a rock at the water in frustration.

Then, I watched Scout. He didn’t thrash around. He waited. He froze by a rabbit hole, motionless as stone, for an hour.

Patience.

I went back to the creek. I slowed my breathing. I became the stone. When the line finally tugged, a jolt of electric adrenaline shot through me. I yanked it up—a small, wriggling trout.

I whooped, the sound echoing off the canyon walls. “We eat tonight, Scout! We eat!”

Cooking it over a fire I barely managed to start, the fish tasted like smoke and charred scales, but it was the best meal of my life. It tasted like victory.

Weeks bled into months. I stopped counting days and started tracking survival. I learned which berries made you sick and which ones burst with sweet juice. I learned that dry moss makes good insulation for your clothes. I learned that silence is a language you have to speak to hear the forest telling you its secrets.

But the mountain tests you. It waits until you get cocky, until you think you’ve figured it out, and then it tries to kill you.

The storm hit in November.

The sky turned a bruised purple, heavy and low. The birds stopped singing. Even the insects went quiet. The silence was heavy, pressing against my eardrums.

“Inside, Scout. Now.”

We retreated to the cabin. I had tried to patch the roof with a tarp I’d scavenged, weighing it down with rocks, but the wind that night wasn’t just wind. It was a physical blow. It shrieked around the corners of the cabin, tearing at the loose boards.

Rain didn’t fall; it was driven horizontally, hammering against the logs like buckshot.

Drip.

Drip. Drip.

Then, a steady stream.

The roof was failing. I scrambled around the dark room, placing our few pots and pans under the leaks. Ping. Ping. Splash. It was a losing battle. The water was icy, numbing my fingers.

We huddled in the dryest corner, wrapped in every piece of clothing we owned. Scout was trembling violently. I wrapped my arms around him, burying my face in his fur.

“It’s okay,” I lied, my voice shaking. “We’re safe.”

CRACK.

It sounded like a gunshot.

Above us, a main support beam groaned—a deep, sickening sound of wood surrendering to weight and rot.

“Move!” I screamed.

I grabbed Scout by the scruff of his neck and threw us both toward the door just as the ceiling above our sleeping corner gave way.

Debris, sodden insulation, and freezing water crashed down exactly where we had been lying seconds before. A cloud of ancient dust and water vapor exploded into the room.

We lay on the wet floorboards, gasping, hearts hammering against our ribs like trapped birds. The wind howled through the new hole in the roof, mocking us. The rain poured in, relentless, soaking our bedding, ruining our dry wood, turning our sanctuary into a swamp.

I sat up, water streaming down my face, mixing with hot tears. I looked at the ruin of our home. The darkness felt absolute. The cold was already seeping into my bones, a deep, deadly chill.

I was eleven years old. I was alone. I had twenty cents left in my pocket. And I had just lost the only shelter I had.

I pulled my knees to my chest and sobbed. Not the quiet crying of before, but deep, ugly, heaving sobs that tore at my throat.

“I can’t do this,” I whispered to the dark. “Mom… why didn’t you come back?”

Scout nudged my hand. He licked the tears from my cheek, his rough tongue warm against my frozen skin. He didn’t whine. He didn’t cower. He just sat there, solid and present, waiting for me to decide.

Give up and die? Or get up and fight?

I looked at the hole in the roof. The storm was raging, but through the jagged gap in the timber, I saw a single, faint star blink into existence for a second before the clouds swallowed it again.

I wiped my face. My hand found the handle of the hammer I’d found earlier that week. It was heavy. Real.

“Okay,” I whispered. The word was small, but it was there.

“Okay, Scout. We’re not done yet.”

PART 2: THE GHOST IN THE RAVINE

Morning didn’t break; it bled into existence. Gray light filtered through the gaping hole in the roof, illuminating the wreckage of our lives. The cabin smelled of wet rot and failure.

I stood up, my joints stiff from the cold. Scout watched me, his head cocked. He wasn’t looking at the damage, though. He was looking at me, waiting for the order. What’s the play, boss?

“We fix it,” I said, my voice raspy. “But we need better wood. And we need nails.”

I had five bent nails I’d pulled from a rotting floorboard with pliers. That wasn’t going to cut it.

I walked out to the porch. The storm had stripped the trees bare, leaving the mountain looking skeletal. Scout barked—sharp, insistent—and trotted toward a dense thicket of mountain laurel I’d never bothered to push through. It was too thorny, too dense.

“Not now, Scout,” I grumbled, bending to pick up a fallen shingle.

He barked again, then looked back at me, his eyes pleading. Trust me.

I sighed and followed him. The thorns tore at my jacket, but Scout moved with a singular purpose. We pushed through the brush and emerged onto the lip of a ravine I hadn’t known existed. It was a steep, jagged scar in the earth, hidden by the canopy.

And there, half-buried in forty years of dead leaves and vines, was a ghost.

It was a pickup truck. A 1950s model, maybe? The paint was a rusted, flaky blue, blending perfectly with the shadows. A sapling was growing straight through the empty space where the windshield used to be.

My heart hammered. A car meant people. But as I slid down the muddy bank, I realized this truck hadn’t moved since before I was born. It was a tomb.

I wrenched the driver’s side door open. It groaned, a screech of metal on metal that sent birds scattering. The seat was a rat’s nest of stuffing, but I didn’t care about the upholstery. I cared about what might be behind it.

I checked the glove box. Empty, save for a mouse skeleton. I checked under the seat. Nothing.

Despair started to claw at my throat again. Just junk. Just—

Scout jumped into the truck bed, his paws skittering on the rusted metal. He started digging frantically at a pile of wet leaves in the corner.

“What do you have?”

I climbed up. Buried beneath the muck was a red metal box. A toolbox.

My hands shook as I wiped the grime away. The latches were rusted shut. I grabbed a rock and smashed the lock, once, twice. It sprang open.

I gasped. It wasn’t gold, but to me, it was better.

A hammer with a solid handle. A set of screwdrivers. A heavy pair of pliers. A handsaw—rusty, but the teeth were still sharp. And at the bottom, wrapped in oilcloth like a holy relic, a cardboard box heavy with nails.

I held a handful of nails up to the light. They were perfect. Unbent. Strong.

“We’re rich, Scout,” I whispered, a laugh bubbling up from my chest. “We are filthy, stinking rich.”

With the tools, everything changed. I wasn’t just scavenging anymore; I was building.

I sawed fresh branches to patch the roof. I used the tarp from the truck—mildewed but waterproof—to seal the hole. I hammered with rhythm, with purpose. Bang. Bang. Bang. The sound echoed through the valley, a declaration that I was still here.

But the mountain had another test waiting.

The air grew sharp. The mornings started with frost that crunched under my sneakers. The wind changed direction, blowing from the north, carrying the scent of snow.

The cabin had a wood stove, a cast-iron beast in the corner, but the stovepipe was disconnected and lying in pieces on the floor. Without it, we would freeze.

I spent three days wrestling with that soot-choked pipe. I scrubbed the rust with sand from the creek. I used the pliers to bend the flanges back into shape. When I finally fit the last piece into the chimney, my hands were black with soot and bleeding from a dozen small cuts.

I lit the first fire with trembling hands. Smoke billowed into the room, choking us.

“No, no, no!”

I scrambled up to the roof, coughing. A bird’s nest was blocking the chimney. I shoved it down with a long branch.

Whoosh.

The smoke sucked upward. Inside, the fire roared to life. The cast iron began to tick and ping as it heated up. Five minutes later, a radiant, beautiful heat began to spread through the room.

That night, for the first time in months, I took off my jacket to sleep. Scout stretched out on his back, belly exposed to the warmth, his legs twitching in a dream. We had conquered the cold.

Or so I thought.

It was January when the stranger came.

The snow was thigh-deep. We were trapped in a white, silent world. I was on the porch, whittling a piece of cedar, when Scout stood up.

He didn’t bark. He emitted a low, vibrating growl that I felt in the floorboards. His hackles stood up like a razorback ridge.

I froze. I looked out at the treeline. Nothing but white snow and black trunks.

Then, movement. A flash of red.

A man.

He was trudging up the path I had painstakingly cleared, wearing snowshoes and a bright red parka. He was moving slowly, looking at the ground.

Panic, cold and sharp, flooded my veins. They found me.

“Inside,” I hissed to Scout.

I grabbed my knife—the pawn shop blade—and backed into the shadows of the doorway. My heart was a frantic drum against my ribs. Do I run? I can’t run in this snow. Do I fight? He’s big.

The man stopped twenty yards from the porch. He looked up. He had a beard white with frost and eyes crinkled against the glare. He didn’t look like a cop. He looked… tired.

He saw me.

I gripped the knife tighter, hiding it behind my leg.

“Afternoon!” he called out. His voice was deep, carrying easily over the snow. “Mighty far up for a young fella to be camping.”

I didn’t answer. I stood rigid, Scout pressing against my leg, a loaded weapon of muscle and teeth ready to spring.

The man waited. He didn’t reach for a radio. He didn’t pull a gun. He just stood there, breathing heavy clouds of steam.

“Storm’s turning,” he said, pointing to the west. “I misjudged the ridge. Gonna be a whiteout in about an hour. My legs aren’t as young as they used to be.” He paused, looking at the smoke curling from my chimney. “I don’t suppose you have room by that fire for a frozen old hiker?”

My mind raced. If I let him in, he sees everything. He sees I’m alone. He sees I’m a kid. But if I leave him out there…

He took a step forward, and stumbled. He was exhausted.

“I’m Henry,” he said, righting himself. “And I promise, I’m not the law. Just a fool who loves the mountains.”

Not the law.

I looked at Scout. The dog had stopped growling. He was sniffing the air, ears pricked. He looked at me and sat down. He’s okay.

I stepped back from the door. “It’s warm inside,” I said, my voice sounding foreign to my own ears.

Henry stayed for two days while the blizzard raged outside.

He was the first human being I had spoken to in a year. I thought I would hate it, that I would be terrified. But Henry was… easy. He didn’t ask “Where are your parents?” He didn’t ask “Why are you here?”

He asked about the stove. He admired the way I’d rigged the roof.

“You got a good eye for structure, son,” he said, sipping coffee from a metal cup he’d pulled from his pack. Real coffee. The smell was intoxicating. “Most men would have let this place fall down. You propped it up.”

“I had to,” I said simply.

“We all do what we have to,” he replied. He broke off a piece of dark chocolate and handed it to me. “That’s the rule of the wild. You adapt, or you die.”

We sat by the fire, listening to the wind howl. He told me stories about the history of the mountain, about the families that used to live here before the park service bought them out or chased them off.

“Ghosts,” he said, looking at the flames. “These woods are full of them. But you… you’re making something new here.”

When the storm broke, he packed his gear. He stood at the door, looking at me. I braced myself for the question. Where’s your mom? let me take you to town.

Instead, he reached into his pack and pulled out a heavy, black camera. An old 35mm film camera.

“I’m too old to lug this up here anymore,” he said. “You keep it. Document this. What you’re doing here… it’s worth remembering.”

He handed it to me. It was cold and heavy.

“Why?” I asked.

He smiled, his eyes disappearing into the wrinkles of his face. “Because everyone deserves to be seen, Jaime. Even if it’s just by themselves.”

He walked away into the snow, a red dot fading into the white. He never asked my last name. He never called the cops. He just left me with a camera and the realization that not all adults were liars.

Spring came with a violence of green. The snow melted into rushing creeks that roared down the ravines. The world woke up hungry.

I was cleaning the debris from under the porch, raking out a year’s worth of dead leaves, when my rake hit something hollow.

I knelt down. Wedged between two rocks, wrapped in a thick, wax-sealed plastic bag, was a packet.

I wiped the dirt off. It was old. The writing was faded.

Vegetable Seeds. Heirloom Variety. 1998.

My hands trembled. Seeds.

I tore the packet open. Inside were smaller paper envelopes: Carrots. Beans. Corn. Tomatoes.

I looked at the cleared patch of earth near the cabin where the sun hit the longest. I looked at the seeds in my palm. They were tiny, dry, lifeless things. But they were a promise.

If I planted these, I wasn’t just surviving. I was staying. You don’t plant a garden if you plan to run. You plant a garden if you plan to harvest.

“Scout,” I said, grabbing the shovel. “We’re going to be farmers.”

We worked the soil until our muscles burned. I planted the seeds in neat rows, just like the diagram on the back of the packet. I watered them with the reverence of a priest.

And I waited.

Seven days later, a tiny curl of green pushed through the black soil. A bean sprout.

I took a picture of it with Henry’s camera. Click.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was proof that life wants to live.

But seeds take time, and my stomach was empty now. The winter had wiped out my scavenged supplies. I was down to eating boiled pine bark and the occasional squirrel Scout caught. I was losing weight. My ribs were starting to show, just like Scout’s had when I found him.

I needed supplies. Real supplies. Salt. Matches. Flour.

I knew there was a trading post about eight miles down the fire road. Henry had mentioned it. Mason’s.

“It’s risky,” I told Scout. “People ask questions.”

But hunger is a loud motivator.

I packed my backpack with the only currency I had: carved wooden figures. I had spent the long winter nights whittling—bears, birds, deer—using the knife and sandpaper I’d found in the truck. They were good. Surprisingly good.

We walked for four hours. When the rusty tin roof of Mason’s Trading Post came into view, my nerve almost failed.

“Stay here, Scout,” I commanded. “Guard.”

He sat in the brush, invisible.

I pushed the door open. A bell jingled—a harsh, cheerful sound that made me flinch.

The store smelled of dust, old cheese, and kerosene. Behind the counter sat a man who looked like he had been carved out of granite. He was reading a newspaper from two days ago.

He looked up over his glasses. His eyes were sharp, blue, and assessing.

“Help you?”

“I… I don’t have money,” I stammered, my voice cracking. “I have trade.”

I dumped the backpack onto the counter. The wooden bears and birds spilled out.

The man—Mason—didn’t blink. He reached out a hand like a bear paw and picked up a carving of a hawk. He turned it over, examining the detail of the feathers.

He looked at me. Really looked at me. He saw the worn clothes. The dirt under my fingernails. The desperation in my stance.

He put the hawk down.

“Salt’s on aisle two,” he said, his voice gravelly. “Flour’s by the window. Don’t take the cheap stuff; it’s got weevils. Take the sack in the red bag.”

I stared at him. “Is this… enough?” I gestured to the carvings.

“For today,” he said. He picked up the newspaper again. “And bring more of the bears next time. Tourists like bears.”

I filled my pack. My hands were shaking so hard I almost dropped the salt.

As I reached the door, he spoke again.

“Boy.”

I froze.

“Storm’s coming in Thursday,” he said without looking up. “Make sure you got enough dry wood.”

“Yes, sir,” I whispered.

I walked out into the sunlight. I had food. I had a trade. And I had a secret ally.

I ran back to the woods, to where Scout was waiting. I buried my face in his fur, breathing in his scent.

“We did it,” I said. “We’re going to make it.”

But as I looked back up the mountain, toward our cabin, I felt a shift. The game had changed. I wasn’t just a lost boy anymore. I was a homesteader. I was a merchant.

But secrets are heavy things to carry. And as the summer heat began to rise, I didn’t know that the smoke on the horizon wasn’t just a campfire. It was a warning.

The world was coming for us.

PART 3: THE FIRE AND THE FUTURE

Smoke is different when it’s wild. Campfire smoke smells like comfort; wildfire smoke smells like the end of the world.

It was August. The heat had been relentless, baking the mountain until the pine needles crunched like glass underfoot. I was fifteen now. Taller, leaner, my hands callous-hard. The cabin wasn’t a ruin anymore; it was a fortress. I had glass in the windows, a garden bursting with corn and squash, and a root cellar stocked for winter.

I was weeding the tomatoes when Scout stood up. He didn’t growl. He whined—a high, thin sound of pure terror.

I looked west.

The sky wasn’t blue. It was a bruised, sickly orange. And beneath it, a wall of gray was eating the horizon.

“Fire,” I whispered. The word tasted like ash.

I didn’t panic. Panic kills. I moved.

“Scout, truck!” I yelled, though the truck was just a rusted shell for storage. It was a command to stay close.

I ran to the rain barrels. I had set up a gravity-fed system with hoses. I dragged them to the roof, soaking the cedar shakes until they dripped. I soaked the porch. I soaked the walls.

Then I grabbed the shovel.

Dig.

I dug a firebreak around the cabin, hacking at the dry earth, tearing up the brush I should have cleared weeks ago. My lungs burned. The air was getting thicker, hotter. Ash began to fall like gray snow, silent and deadly.

Night fell, but it didn’t get dark. The forest glowed with a demonic red light. The roar was deafening—like a freight train that never passed.

“We have to go,” a voice in my head screamed. Run to the creek. Run to the cave.

But I looked at the cabin. I looked at the chess set I’d carved on the table inside. I looked at the garden where the beans were just starting to flower.

This wasn’t just wood and stone. This was me. If I ran, I was just a homeless kid again. If I stayed, I was a man defending his home.

“We fight,” I told Scout. He pressed against my leg, shivering, but he didn’t run.

The fire cresting the ridge was a monster. Trees exploded—BOOM—sending geysers of sparks into the sky. The heat punched me in the face.

I stood on the roof with wet burlap sacks, swatting at the embers that rained down. My shirt was smoking. My eyes were swollen shut.

“Come on!” I screamed at the fire. “Is that all you got?”

It was a stupid, reckless thing to yell at a force of nature. But in that moment, I was feral. I was the mountain.

We fought for six hours. I put out spot fires in the garden. I smothered a burning branch that landed on the porch. Scout barked at the flames, snapping at the sparks like they were flies.

And then, just before dawn, the wind shifted.

It was a miracle. The wall of fire turned north, pushed by a sudden downdraft, consuming the ridge away from us.

I collapsed on the soaked, blackened earth of the yard. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. Scout crawled over and licked the soot from my face.

We were alive. The cabin was singed, the garden was half-burnt, but it was standing.

I looked at the charred forest around us. It was ugly. It was dead. But green shoots would come back. They always did.

And that’s when I knew. I couldn’t hide anymore. The fire had exposed us—literally. The dense cover was gone. Aerial surveys would see the cabin. The smoke would bring rangers.

I needed to be legal.

The decision took a year of planning. I saved every penny from my trade with Mason. I had thousands of dollars stashed in the coffee tin now—money from tourists buying “authentic mountain crafts.”

I walked into the county courthouse on my eighteenth birthday. I wore clean clothes I’d bought from a catalog Mason let me order from. I had cut my hair. I had shaved.

Scout waited in the truck—a real truck this time, a beat-up Ford I’d bought from Mason’s cousin for $800.

The clerk looked at me over her spectacles. “Can I help you?”

“I want to pay the back taxes on the Pritchard property,” I said. “Parcel 402.”

She blinked. “That place has been abandoned for twenty years, son. County seized it.”

“I know,” I said. I pulled a stack of papers from my folder. “I’ve been maintaining it for seven years. I’m filing for adverse possession. Squatter’s rights.”

She stared at me. Then she looked at the papers. Photos of the garden. Receipts for building materials. Sworn affidavits from Mason and Henry—yes, I had tracked him down—attesting that I was the sole occupant.

“You’re the ghost of the ridge,” she whispered.

“I’m not a ghost,” I said, my voice steady. “My name is Jaime Thorne. And I’m home.”

It took six months of legal battles. They tried to say I was a vagrant. They tried to say I was trespassing. But I had the money. I had the proof. And I had the community. Mason stood up in court and called me “the hardest working man in the county.”

When the judge finally banged the gavel, declaring me the legal owner of 40 acres of Appalachian hardwood, I didn’t cheer. I just let out a breath I’d been holding since I was eleven years old.

EPILOGUE: THE SANCTUARY

The sign hanging over the driveway is simple: MOUNTAIN SANCTUARY.

I’m standing on the porch of the new bunkhouse. It smells of fresh cedar and hope.

A van pulls up. The door slides open, and a group of teenagers steps out. They look like I did—scared, angry, wearing hoodies like armor. They are foster kids, runaways, the ones the system chewed up and spit out.

A boy steps forward. He’s clutching a backpack like it’s full of gold. He has a black eye and a defiant tilt to his chin.

“Who are you?” he asks, looking around at the gardens, the workshop, the dogs running in the field.

I smile. A new dog, Luna, trots up to my side. Scout passed away three years ago, buried under the old pine where we spent our first night. But his spirit is in every beam of this place.

“I’m Jaime,” I say. “And this isn’t a shelter. It’s a home. If you’re willing to work for it.”

The boy looks at the cabin. He looks at the mountains rising behind it, wild and free. He looks at me, really sees me.

“I got nowhere else to go,” he whispers.

“I know,” I say, opening the door. “That’s exactly where you need to be to start.”

I was abandoned with twenty dollars and a broken promise. I built a life out of trash and determination. I learned that family isn’t blood; it’s who stands beside you when the roof caves in.

I look at the boy, and for a second, I see myself standing at that gas station.

“Welcome home,” I say.

And I mean it.