Free The Breaking Point by Karen Ball

whine coming from deep in his throat. She pushed him away. “Not now, boy. Lie down.”
    He did as she ordered, but his worried eyes never left her as she closed her mittened fingers on Gabe’s shoulder and gave him a gentle shake. “Gabe?”
    When he stirred slightly and moaned, wild hope raced through Renee’s veins, sending her pulse pounding in her temples. The shake she gave him this time was anything but gentle. “Gabe, wake
up!”
    He drew a shuddering breath, and she waited for his eyes to flicker open—instead, he seemed to settle back into the oblivion Renee was slowly coming to hate.
    “No …”
    Her hands fisted in the blanket covering Gabe, and she caught her breath at the emotions that churned within her, surging through her like liquid fire, making her feel hot and ice cold all at once. It took all her strength to relax her fingers, to let go of the blanket and not shake Gabe until he opened his eyes. She wouldn’t even have cared if he yelled at her.
    Anything was better than this dense, terrifying silence. Snow had settled in a thick blanket over the windshield, which meant it probably covered a good portion of the rest ofthe truck as well. The result was an eerie kind of muffling, as though both light and sound were being kept at bay. Renee felt encased, trapped, entombed in a place of isolation and gloom.
    So this is what it feels like to be a mummy …
    She turned to face the windshield, planting her hands on the dash, feeling the cold of the plastic even through her mittens.
    They were running out of time.
    “Where are You?” The question came out in a hoarse whisper, breaking the suffocating silence around her. “Behold, I am with you always, remember? Even to the end of the world. Isn’t that what You promised?”
    Guilt assailed her at the sarcasm in her tone—after all, who was she to question God?—but it was quickly pushed aside, obliterated by the pounding of her heart, the ragged breathing that tore at her lungs, the trembling that assaulted her from the inside out …a trembling that she knew had nothing to do with the icy weather and everything to do with the emotion that seared her heart and singed the corners of her control.
    She’d denounced Gabe’s anger for years. How many of her weekly phone calls to her parents had disintegrated into Renee complaining about Gabe, criticizing him for not trusting God enough, for not resting in God’s promises and peace?
    A harsh laugh broke the stillness in the cab, and Renee was startled to realize it had come from her. Wouldn’t Mom and Dad be proud of her now? Of the faith she was showing?
    They would understand.
    Her lip curled. Maybe they would, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Because she shouldn’t have to face this. She pounded her clenched hands on the dash.
    “No!”
    She’d gone through so much—all the years of struggling and enduring a difficult marriage … of following God intodarkness and pain, holding fast to His promise of hope no matter how impossible it seemed—and
this
was her reward? All her effort to do what was right rather than what was expedient, and it ended
here? “No!”
    She stared at the snow-shrouded windshield, trying to see beyond it to the wilderness. “Where
are
You?”
    At first, all that met her cry was the same muted silence. And then it came. One simple word whispering through her with the softness of a baby’s breath.
    Peace.
    She waited, wanting—no,
needing
more.
Peace … be still.
    She struggled to hold on to those words, to embrace and rest in them, but she couldn’t. Didn’t God know she needed more than just that? She needed help! Disappointment sliced through her, leaving her already-raw nerves in tatters. But she wasn’t entirely sure who she was most disappointed in: God … or herself.
    She should be able to handle this. She should be doing better. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t doing well at all.
    “I don’t have
time
to be still!” A terrible bitterness caught hold of