Jarod and Miss Parker simultaneously suffer near-death experiences that involve Faith, a young girl from their past.
Jarod's plane crashes in the mountains of Montana before he can complete his "mayday" call, and the radio in his emergency kit fails before he can accurately describe his location. Jarod manages to treat his dislocated shoulder, but he cannot properly treat his leg. It's winter and snowing. A hungry wolf is stalking him. Jarod isn't certain where he is, and he's too badly wounded to hike out.
As Jarod tries to keep from succumbing to the cold and his injuries, he dreams about Faith, a young girl that he, Miss Parker and Angelo befriended at The Centre years ago. Faith died of leukemia, but because of the three children, she didn't die alone. In his eleventh hour, when Jarod is ready to give up and let death take him, Faith appears. She laughs and dances in the snow, then tells Jarod not to give up because "they'll" be coming for him soon. Not long after, Broots figures out where he crashed and sends the search and rescue team find him.
Miss Parker's ulcer perforates and she collapses. Rushed to the hospital and directly into surgery, Miss Parker develops peritonitis and hovers between life and death. As Broots pours out his heart to the woman whose friendship he quietly treasures, Miss Parker shares Jarod's dream about the lesson in love that she, Jarod and Angelo learned from the dying child. Before Faith died, Miss Parker gave her Catherine Parker's rosary in hopes of bringing her the same comfort that Miss Parker had derived from it.
Lying in the hospital bed, Miss Parker does what she would be incapable of doing while standing on two feet -- she surrenders. As her vital signs fade to silence, Faith appears at the foot of her bed and tells her to fight, that it isn't her time and that Catherine Parker wants her to fight, too. The machines monitoring Miss Parker come back to life, and so does she.
Afterwards, Miss Parker asks her father who Faith was. He tells her that she was a ward of the state, diagnosed with leukemia and left in a convalescent home to die alone. The Parkers adopted her and brought her to The Centre. An experimental drug that The Centre was developing didn't save Faith's life, but future treatments proved successful because of what they learned from her.
Miss Parker takes the rosary back to Faith, placing it on the girl's headstone.