Very moving story. Hart to finish, but it was faithful to the premise. It remined me of Andersen's Girl with matches and London's to Build a Fire.
There is no possible alternative ending for stories like those. We see those outcomes once in a while on the news. I remember this story of a father who left mother and daughter in the car that broke down in frigid weather and went out for help.
As a matter of fact, for me it is a real miracel that this does not happen more often given the amount of people living and venturing in cold and isolated areas.
Our world is more hostile than we want it to be and we more fragile than we think. Our life here sometimes looks like "brief reprieves" (to use @d-pend's words).