A girl. A boy. Bridget. Dylan. Very bad things can happen to families. And when very bad things–the worst–do happen to their families, Bridget and Dylan believe they must escape a cruel world that threatens even them. Together they run away to the deep isolated wilderness of northern California, far from other people. To survive there is brutally hard yet always surrounded by great beauty. Painfully they learn the lessons of the mountains. They learn to stay hidden from their human enemies. They learn they have each other and an unspoken love. But time is supposed to heal all wounds and all tragedies, or at least accept them as inevitable. Bridget. Dylan. One of them agrees about time and acceptance, the other does not. Now they have their mountains, or a return from the mountains, or their unspoken love, and an impossible choice to make.

The novel was placed on numerous best-of-year lists.