Chapter Six #2
I walked into town the next morning, Day Nine, for supplies the lodge’s half-stocked kitchen couldn’t supply, and ran into Renata Osei outside the hardware store, a woman I’d gone to high school with who now ran the town’s one real coffee shop and had, twenty years ago, been maid of honor at a wedding that wasn’t mine.
“Hollis Marsh,” she said, the same formulation the whole town seemed to have settled on, my maiden name doing quiet work I hadn’t asked it to do.
“Heard you were back. Heard a lot of things, actually, most of them from my niece’s phone.
” She said it without malice, mostly curious, the open curiosity of someone who’d known me at seventeen and was trying to reconcile that girl with whatever the internet had shown her.
“You doing okay? Genuinely asking, not just being polite about it.”
“Working on it,” I said, which was, I noticed, becoming my answer for everything, and Renata seemed to accept it as the complete sentence it wasn’t.
Not everyone in town extended the same easy grace.
Coming out of the hardware store a few minutes later with a bag of hinges for the shed door, I passed Loralei Finch, who’d run the town’s other outfitting business — the regional chain’s local franchise, the one Simone had mentioned had undercut Wade’s rates for years — and who looked at me with an expression that had none of Renata’s warmth in it at all.
“Didn’t expect to see a Marsh back in this town outfitting anybody,” she said, not quite under her breath, loud enough to be sure I’d hear it.
“Your dad let that place run itself into the ground rather than sell to somebody who’d have kept the jobs local.
Now his daughter shows up with a famous husband’s money to save it, I suppose. ”
“I’m not spending his money,” I said, before I’d fully decided to answer at all.
“And my father trained half this town’s climbers for free when they couldn’t pay full rate.
I’d think carefully before you decide which Marsh actually cost this town something.
” I didn’t wait to see how she took it, and walked the two blocks to Cedar Ridge with the bag of hinges still in hand, because I’d told the front desk I’d stop by, and because some encounters need a second, kinder one right afterward to keep from souring the whole morning.
I found Wade in the day room with a checkers board set up and nobody to play against. I sat down across from him, and we played two games in near silence, the same comfortable quiet that has always existed between us, my father moving pieces with the same unhurried deliberation he’d once used checking a rope’s fraying, and somewhere in the second game he said, without looking up from the board, “You’ve got that look. ”
“What look.”
“The one you get when you’ve found something you can’t put down yet.
” He took one of my pieces, cleanly, the way he’s beaten me at this exact game since I was six.
“Your mother used to get it over a good book. You get it over a problem.” He glanced up, then, and held my eyes a moment longer than checkers required.
“Whatever it is, I trust you to know what to do with it. Always have.”
I didn’t tell him about the tape. I wasn’t ready yet to say it out loud to anyone, even the one person in the world who’d trained me to notice exactly the kind of thing I’d found.
But I held onto I trust you to know what to do with it the whole drive back to the lodge, the way you’d hold onto a good weather report before a window you weren’t yet sure you were going to use.
I understood, driving back out the gravel spur road with the range going gold in the late morning light, that Larkspur Falls was not going to hand me an easy homecoming just because I needed one, and that I did not, in fact, need one.
I needed a roof, a first paying group, a father who deserved better than a stack of unopened bank statements — and I needed, more than any of that, to know the rest of what was on those drives.
I got the kids fed and down for the evening, and went back to the trestle table once the great room had gone quiet, and pulled the fourth drive instead of returning to the third, telling myself I was simply working in sequence, cataloguing the way any professional would.
I logged for two more hours — a windstorm at high camp, a customs delay in a country whose name still made my stomach drop a little to remember, a shot of Rhys laughing at something off-camera that had never once made a single cut of any film — and found nothing else that night with the force of the tent recording.
I hadn’t expected to. Lightning like that doesn’t strike twice in one sitting, and some part of me, cataloguing steadily into the small hours with a headache building behind my eyes, understood that I didn’t need it to.
One recording was already more than I knew what to do with.
I thought, shutting the laptop down a little after midnight, about the actual shape of what I now possessed: not proof that Rhys didn’t love me, which I had never doubted, but proof, timestamped and unimpeachable, that the industry built around his survival had looked directly at the truest evidence of what kept him alive and decided it made a worse story than the one where a man conquers a mountain by himself.
That was not a fact about my marriage. That was a fact about an entire machine, and I understood, closing the laptop, that I had just found the first real leverage I’d ever held against it.
I sat with that word — leverage — a long moment before I let myself keep it.
Twelve years of marriage is not supposed to run on leverage.
I know that as well as anyone, and I would have told you, a week earlier, that a woman keeping score against her own husband had already lost something worth more than whatever she thought she was protecting.
But I had also spent twelve years believing that being indispensable to Rhys’s survival was its own form of being chosen, and Day Eight had shown me, in his own unrehearsed voice, that the indispensability was real and the being-seen had never once followed automatically from it.
If the truth required leverage to finally get told, on the record, with the sound up, then leverage was simply the tool the situation had handed me.
I have never once, in my professional life, refused to use the correct tool because I didn’t like what it said about the job.
I turned off the great room’s single working lamp and went to check on the kids before I let myself sleep — Wyatt sprawled sideways across his bed with the glacier book still open, Birdie curled tight around the stuffed fox with the stillness of a child who has finally stopped bracing for something — and stood in each doorway a moment longer than I needed to, doing the inventory I always do at the end of a hard day: both children breathing, both safe, both loved by two parents even while those two parents figured out the rest of it.
Nine hundred hours, minus what I’d already logged, still sat on those drives, waiting.
I went to bed without a plan. I went to bed, for the first time in eight days, without pretending to myself that I wasn’t going to make one.