Chapter 2
Alec
The window finally gives beneath my knife, creaking open just enough to let in a whisper of air.
For weeks I’ve been prying at the damn thing, trying to fight the hospital stench of bleach and recycled air.
My lungs yearn for mountain wind, for anything that doesn’t smell like disinfectant and stale coffee.
I press my forehead to the frame, close my eyes, and try to breathe.
“You look like shit,” a voice wheezes out behind me.
The knife nearly slips from my hand. I spin, heart in my throat. The couch legs screech against the floor. There he is.
“You’re awake,” I blurt like an idiot.
“Unless I’m dead and this is Hell. In which case, man, you’ve really dropped the ball by not busting me out.” Finn grins his usual crooked grin.
He has always tried to make the world lighter, even when it crushed us. He smiled with his skull cracked open on Denali. Made jokes about frostbite on Lhotse when we could smell the rot in his toes. Laughed when he woke up in Mercy General two weeks ago.
But now that lightness sits wrong, stretched over a pale body wired up with IVs and clamped together with steel.
“I’ll get the nurse,” I manage.
“No need. They’ve got me on the good stuff today.” He wiggles his taped-up fingers like a magician revealing a trick everyone’s seen before. Except this one is morphine.
Thirty years of friendship, and the bastard is still the clown. Stoned, stitched together with screws, lying in a hospital bed, and somehow acting like he just scored front-row seats to the Oakland street fair dunk tank.
I drop into the chair beside him. My skin feels too tight. I wish I could unzip myself and crawl elsewhere.
“Cut it out,” he says.
“What?”
“Looking at me like that.” He rolls his deep-brown eyes. “They put two more screws in my hip. I’m practically bionic. The next Tin Man. Cheer up.”
K2 didn’t just break Finn, it obliterated him.
His right hip and femur were shattered, bones splintered, the joint crushed, nerves so fucked he still can’t feel his leg.
The first surgery was just to stop the internal bleeding, save his frostbitten toes, and make sure his body didn’t shut down.
The second was to bolt him back together.
And it’s still not over. In two weeks, they’ll cut him open again to rebuild the hip. Only then can he start physical therapy. The doctors warned me—best case, he won’t walk for two, maybe three months.
It’ll be another month until he’s out of the hospital, and then he’ll be stuck with a full-time physical therapist. I’ve already started hunting for the best one I can find. But the truth sits heavy: No one knows when he’ll set foot on the ice again. Or if he’ll even want to.
“Cheer up?” I echo flatly.
“Yes,” he shoots back, his tone sharp despite the haze of drugs. “You’re depressing me.”
“I thought the Tin Man didn’t have feelings.”
“There he is.” He swats at my shoulder but misses by inches. “My favorite asshole.”
I panic, leaning over to push him back before he tears something. He half wrestles me off. Two idiots slap-fighting in a hospital bed. He laughs. And the sound rips me apart. Because it doesn’t lift me. Doesn’t make me lighter.
“Didn’t think I’d get to hear you laugh again,” I mutter.
“Oh Christ, not this again.” He pushes past the haze for one sharp second and pins me with that look. “I’ll say it one more time, and then I never want to hear it again: I chose to climb K2.”
He’s said that since the evac, since that first night in this ward when the doctors promised he’d make it till morning. But it doesn’t land. It can’t.
Because I picked the route. I called the weather window. I was the one who took an extra minute at the top. I was supposed to take care of him, the way I always have.
“You don’t have to keep feeling guilty—”
“Don’t,” I cut him off. I can’t listen to him forgive me again, like it’s that simple.
We sit with only the squeak of the frame clamped around his leg and the steady beeping of the machines between us.
“I’m serious.” He waves the TV remote at me. “If you’re going to sit here, you can’t keep punishing yourself. It’s annoying.”
I huff out something between a laugh and a fuck off, because my guilt doesn’t take orders.
“You’re right, we don’t need to keep talking about it.”
“No, man, we fucking do,” Finn snaps. “Every other day, apparently, because you’re still wearing that tragic boo-hoo face. And you haven’t shaved since I got admitted.”
I swipe a hand down my beard, which is rough and uneven. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s gettin’ biblical, Alec. Go home. See your parents. Take a real shower. Stop cramping my style with the nurses.” He gestures at the couch I’ve carved a permanent crater into. His usual tan skin looks wrong, his eyes hollow in a way no mountain night ever made them.
He thinks he’s here because it was his fate. I know better.
“I’m not leaving you,” I say.
I’ll never make him understand that I can’t shave, can’t shower, can’t go home until I make this right.
“Then at least take a walk,” Finn says, lips slack with morphine. “Put a sock on the door so Nurse Fiona can sneak back in and give me a sponge bath.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“You’re jealous.” He shifts, groans, then recovers like it’s part of the bit. “But maybe I should save my energy for the lady I’m gonna meet in Misthaven.”
“Misthaven?”
He blinks like I’ve sprouted a second head. “Alaska, genius. Don’t tell me you forgot everything we swore? We did it. Every fucking peak crossed off our list. We said we’d retire. You said it.” His voice drops, serious now. “You and me, growing old in Alaska. End of an era.”
You said it.
He thinks that matters.
“We did say that,” I mutter, but it tastes like blood in my mouth.
Finn leans forward, IV line tugging. “We didn’t just say it. You promised it. You looked me in the eye and said, No more after this. You wouldn’t make me step foot on another mountain. You said we’d be the lucky bastards who lived.”
I would’ve said anything on K2.
When I lost him in the whiteout, I would’ve promised God and the Devil both that I’d quit climbing, quit breathing, if only Finn came back.
I spent hours digging. First with a shovel that clinked with every strike, then with my own hands when the metal gave out.
My gloves froze stiff, my nails split bloody, and still I clawed.
I wouldn’t call for a retrieval team; the Sherpas risk their lives every day, and I couldn’t bear it if someone died in the storm because of us.
The night sky was collapsing faster than I could move, and when I found him with blue lips, skin the color of ash, half a body already smothered by the mountain, I thought it was over. I thought he was gone.
“That lodge was never a joke, Alec,” he presses, leaning back on his pillow.
“Did you think I was just fucking around talking about that place at every base camp? I can picture it, man. Long dining room table, a deck to grill on, a fireplace with a bookcase next to it filled with adventure novels. We’ll have kids and dogs running across the floorboards.
A wife for each of us. A home. Not a tent flapping on some death ridge. Don’t tell me you didn’t mean it.”
His conviction is ridiculous. As if he isn’t thirty-two with a hip full of screws, alarms flashing every time his heart rate spikes. But his eyes burn like a summit flare. Hope, alive where it shouldn’t be.
“Doubt that place is even standing anymore,” I say.
“It is. Margaret Lennox has been looking after it—Bill’s wife, you remember. The muffins?” His face softens. “She’s kept it going since he passed.”
We bought the lodge with our first sponsorship check, drunk on altitude and money after Denali. Finn always said it would be our last stop. A base camp that never moves.
I never paid much attention to that daydream.
We’re climbers, not homemakers.
“You really think we’re just going to…settle? Fix up an abandoned lodge in the Last Frontier and call that living?”
“Hell yes. That’s exactly what I think. We beat the mountains, Alec. You don’t get greedy after that. You retire.”
Retirement. He says it like it’s salvation. Like he hasn’t been cut out of the only life we’ve ever known.
I picture the place, roof probably torn by Alaskan winters, boards warped by rain, windows cracked. And Finn, who won’t be lifting a hammer anytime soon. Who may never climb a ladder again.
The thought makes my skin itch. A quiet life in a rotting house. No peaks. No summit fever. No air thinned to glass.
Just a normal life?
But he’s watching me, waiting for me to keep my word. And maybe if I get there first, make it whole, safe in a way K2 never was, maybe he won’t see me and remember that day.
He lifts his brows. “When have I steered us wrong?”
“Last thing those floors need is your wheels gouging them up,” I mutter.
“You’re a control freak.”
Not enough of one. Not when it mattered.
“Maybe I just know you,” I say. “You’ve never been handy. I’ve been pitching our tents since we were ten.”
He laughs, then winces, metal groaning inside him.
“I’ll go up there,” I force out. “Get it started.”
His eyes widen. “You mean it?”
“What? Now you don’t want me gone?”
“By all means. I’d rather not stare at your scraggly mug every day. But…” He swallows, voice softer now. “Don’t break this promise, Alec. Don’t make me the only one still believing.”
So I make the vow, hollow as it feels. I’ll put the lodge back together, board by board. Give him the home he dreamed of. A base camp that never moves.
Because I couldn’t keep him safe.
But I can do this.
And maybe when it’s finished, I’ll tell him the truth.
Retirement isn’t for me.