Chapter 25 Alec #2
“I should be over it by now. It’s stupid.” My hands twist the steering wheel, knuckles aching, trying to wring out the tension that refuses to leave me.
“Your feelings aren’t stupid.”
A short, dry laugh escapes me. “I’ve been in avalanches. Climbed unroped on glaciers. I’ve been to more funerals than most people my age. And Finn didn’t even die. He’s getting better. But I still find myself on that mountain. I still hear—” My voice splinters.
Her hand slides from my arm to my hand, resting there lightly, grounding me.
“Sometimes talking about it helps. I don’t get the need to climb,” she says.
“But I get doing something no one else understands. Doing it anyway because it calls to you. My gran never understood why my grandpa kept going back to Denali, but she understood the way it broke him and healed him too. If you want to tell me, I’ll listen. ”
I swallow hard. “When we were sixteen, Finn and I made a pact—to climb all fourteen eight-thousand-meter peaks. Not just climb them, but take routes no one had ever taken before. Stupid teenage shit. But after Shishapangma, the first one, we realized we could actually do it. So, we kept going. Got sponsors, got paid. One after the other. Years in Nepal, Pakistan, training nonstop. K2…we tried it at twenty-five, had to turn back because of avalanches. K2 isn’t the tallest, but she claims more climbers than any other. She doesn’t forgive mistakes.”
The rest comes out haltingly. The narrow weather window.
The minute I kept us there too long. The summit.
The serac. Finn falling. Me rappelling into the dark, chipping ice off his leg the size of a washing machine.
His pulse under my glove. Hauling him out, dragging him back to Camp Three, praying he’d still be breathing in the helicopter.
The weeks in Mercy General, where I stopped shaving, stopped eating, because every second felt like my fault.
And she just sits there, patient, staring at me with those beautiful eyes.
I don’t tell her the part that still eats me alive—that Finn wants to retire, and even after today I can’t picture myself doing the same.
She’d understand. I saw her dance alone in the garage.
Ballet lives in her bones the way climbing lives in mine.
But after the panic thirty minutes ago, how the hell am I supposed to make it down a wall in Iceland this November when I can’t even get down one here?
That’s a thought I shove to the back of my mind, a checklist item I’ll address later.
When I finish talking, there are tears welling in my eyes.
I haven’t cried since Bjorn’s funeral three years ago.
My fingers trace the tattooed rings around my forearm, aiming to ground myself.
But then her hand is there. It lands steady over mine, her thumb tracing a scar along my palm.
She pushes up the center console and slides close until her thigh presses against mine.
“You went back for him,” she says, eyes glassy. “You didn’t freeze. You didn’t run. You saved him. That’s what makes you extraordinary.”
I shake my head, guilt clawing up my throat. “But it was my fault we were in that place. Maybe K2 was never meant for us. I shouldn’t have let us go up.”
“From what you told me about Finn, he seems like the type who would’ve gone anyway.”
“But I was the planner. I chose the window.” My hands curl into fists in my lap, nails digging into my palms.
“That first day, you told me nature is unpredictable. I’d bet Finn knew that too. “And you don't know what would’ve happened if he’d planned the route or if you'd started down sooner.”
“He might never climb again.”
“Maybe. But he’s still here. Have you been blaming yourself this whole time?”
My gaze flits away because I’m afraid she already knows the answer.
“Is that why the lodge is so important? Why you haven’t built yourself a room because you don’t think you deserve one?” She pulls apart my feelings so easily, like she’s felt them before.
“And here I was rambling about being in debt and quitting ballet, and you were just carrying this the whole time?”
“Your problems are—”
“Oh, I know they’re valid. But maybe we could’ve been talking about more than snacks and CPR on these hikes.
You could’ve added to my oversharing! Look at the Therapy Tacoma doing her work today.
” She strokes the side of the seat, and I let out a small laugh, the first real sound I’ve made since I left the rock face.
“I thought if I could get the lodge ready for him, I’d get over it.”
She scoffs. “I wish forgetting problems was that easy. Trust me, my debt wishes that too.” Then her voice softens. “Alec…what happened up there wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah—” I try to brush her off, but she tilts my chin back to her.
“What happened to Finn wasn’t your fault.” She repeats it, slower this time. “I know we both have issues taking compliments, but this isn’t a compliment. This is the truth.”
I inhale. “I’m sorry about the competition. I almost made us lose.”
“Honestly? It’s a relief, because for the last month, I thought I was going to make us lose.” The corner of her mouth inches up. “Today only made you seem more human. And, like you said, we didn’t need to win—just qualify. And we did.”
“Thanks to you.”
“Thanks to us.” Clem gives me a soft smile, fingers still moving absently on my hand, steadying the storm inside of me. “You wanna get out of here?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me drive.”
“I got it.”
“Let me drive. I wanna take you somewhere,” she says, firmer this time.
“I don’t like surprises,” I tease.
“What happened to spontaneity?” She’s already flinging open the passenger door, red hair whipping around the front of my truck.
My fingers tighten around the keys before I finally leave them in the ignition. Just metal and plastic, but letting her take them feels like handing over the other end of my line.
Finn gets here in three days. The lodge is ready for him, every corner prepped. And yet the unease clinging to my chest hasn’t loosened. I still need to tell him I want to climb again.
I have time, I tell myself. Today, I just want to sit beside the girl who makes the world less heavy to carry.