Chapter Fourteen
Kat could barely hear her own thoughts. Maybe that was for the best.
Hanson’s right boot found the metal support outside the gondola. Then his left. For half a second, he stood there with one hand on the frame and one hand on the edge of the car, his body suspended between Alice above and the ground below, the orange rescue basket no longer blocking the view.
Above, one hand gripping the side of the gondola, the other pressed against her chest, Alice watched the medics below close around her husband.
Even from the ground, Kat could read the terrible pull of it.
Alice wanted to be with Clint. Every line of her body leaned toward the earth, toward the man being worked on beside the medical table.
But the Ferris wheel was still locked. The gondola still hung near the top. And Hanson was the only thing moving.
Carson stood with one arm around Jess, his gaze pulled in two directions at once—toward the man on the ground who had recently become family and his mother still trapped in the sky.
Preston had one hand locked on the fence rail, the other curled so tightly at his side the knuckles had gone white.
Garret stood beside him, breathing hard, jaw clenched.
Nobody knew where to look. Kat did. She couldn’t look anywhere else.
Hanson clipped his safety line to the main frame, checked it with one hard tug, then shifted sideways along the steel toward the hub. He was lower than he had been during the rescue, but not low enough for her to consider him safe. There was no version of that height that could be called safe.
A siren sounded somewhere behind her and she glanced back. The ambulance doors slammed shut and within moments, the vehicle blew out of the field and down the road. Her gaze turned to Sarah Sue who had moved next to Preston. “He’s stable. Dad’s going to follow the ambulance. He’s very optimistic.”
Preston leaned forward, kissed the tip of his wife’s nose and softly asked, “You okay?”
She nodded at him, their gazes locking, and there it was. That thing all the Sweets had found. A love that seemed impenetrable and totally enviable to everyone else.
A sizzle sound mixed with gasps had her looking up just in time to see sparks fly and Hanson kick back from the frame and swing away from the sparks.
Crap. No one said sparks were a concern.
All she wanted was for Hanson to touch ground safely, Alice and the others off the Ferris wheel, and then go see for herself that Clint was going to be fine. She hoped.
The access panel was open. She could tell because his body had shifted—the lateral movement stopped, his weight settled differently on the frame, and both arms were working at something she couldn’t make out from the ground.
His boots were planted on a crossbar, knees slightly bent, the posture of a man trusting his footing completely because his hands were occupied with something else entirely.
The crowd around her had gone church-quiet.
Rachel’s hand found hers again without looking. Kat didn’t squeeze back. She didn’t have the grip for it.
To work on whatever was jammed inside the hub, Hanson had to lean backward over open air.
He braced his boots against a narrow lip of steel, trusting his body weight and the tension of the harness to hold him.
She could see him pull something heavy from the gear bag slung over his shoulder.
He needed both hands. He was entirely dependent on the grip of his boots and the nylon webbing of his safety gear.
Kat stopped breathing. Around her, the crowd seemed to sense the shift in danger. The murmurs died down. Hundreds of faces tilted upward, watching the solitary figure suspended against the sky.
Hanson raised both arms, driving whatever tool he held into the machinery.
His right arm moved. A deliberate turn. Then his left. She couldn’t see the tools from down here—just the shape of his arms working at the hub, the particular focus of a man doing something that required precision and couldn’t be hurried.
Then his right boot slipped.
It happened so fast that her mind registered it before her body did—the sudden drop, the jerk of the lanyard snapping taut, the hard crack of the safety line going rigid against the frame.
He swung sideways. Both hands still up. Still holding whatever he was holding.
Still not grabbing for the rail because his hands were full and dropping what was in them into the crowd forty feet below was not something Hanson Taylor was going to do.
The sound that came from the people around her was not a scream. It was worse than a scream. It was the sound of an entire crowd inhaling simultaneously and then producing nothing. Complete silence. The kind that had weight.
Five seconds.
She counted them. She would count them for the rest of her life.
His boots found the crossbar.
He didn’t look down. Didn’t pause. Didn’t shake out his hands or adjust his grip or do anything that acknowledged what had just happened to anyone watching from below. He just found the steel and went back to what he was doing as if the last few seconds hadn’t happened.
The exhale from the crowd was audible.
Kat’s legs felt like someone had removed the bones from them.
“Sweet mother,” Preston said, very quietly, to no one.
Nobody answered him.
Hanson’s arm moved again at the hub. Then stopped. He held position for a long moment—both hands still, body braced—and then one arm came free and extended outward, fist closed, thumb up.
The signal.
The teenage operator at the control panel looked up, nodded, and then the wheel shuddered, groaned, and thank the Lord, moved.
One slow rotation. Then another. The remaining gondolas began their descent in sequence, the wheel doing what it was built to do, each car coming around to the boarding platform in the unhurried rhythm.
Alice’s gondola reached the platform and Preston was there before the bar lifted, his arms around his mother before her feet cleared the step, and Alice held on to her son for exactly three seconds before she stepped back and looked up at the frame where Hanson had begun to descend.
Clip. Move. Clip. Coming down the same way he’d gone up.
No faster, no slower, no drama in it. Just the deliberate rhythm of a man who had done what needed doing and was now completing the sequence.
Kat stood at the base of the frame, she didn’t take her eyes off him for a single second of the descent. Twenty feet. Ten. Then five and his boots hit the ground with a glorious thud.
The heavy thud of Hanson’s landing sent a sharp, residual ache through his right shoulder—a stark reminder of the lanyard catching his full body weight sixty feet in the air—but the pain was distant.
Secondary. He stripped off his heavy leather work gloves, unclipped the harness, and let the nylon webbing fall away.
He turned, and Kat was already there, slamming into him with desperate, trembling force.
There was no hesitation; he dropped the heavy gear bag into the dirt, and effortlessly folded his arms around her, tucking her tightly against his chest. Her arms locked around his neck as if she was afraid gravity might try to claim him again.
Closing his eyes, he buried his face in her hair, anchoring her against his heart, he held her as tightly as he dared. Nothing had ever felt so right.
“You’re okay,” she muttered into his shoulder, her voice rapid and breathless, muffled by his shirt. “I thought… when you slipped, my heart stopped. It actually stopped, Hanson. I was so worried. Thank God you’re down and everyone’s okay.”
“I’m right here.” He pressed a long, solid kiss to the top of her head.
“I’m not going anywhere. Promise.” For a long, quiet moment, they merely stood there in the dirt at the base of the massive steel wheel, holding each other close, letting the noise of the fairgrounds and the distant sirens wash completely over them.
Then, a realization hit him. It started in his chest and expanded outward, bright and startlingly clear.
Still holding her close, he pulled his head back just enough to rest his cheek against her temple. “Kat.”
Tipping her head back slightly, her gaze met his. “Yeah?”
“I did it.” The words felt strange in his mouth, heavy with a weight he hadn’t fully processed yet.
He looked up at the towering iron structure of the wheel.
“I didn’t forget. Not for a single second.
Not what I was doing, or why I was up there, or how the mechanics worked.
” It was the first time since the explosion—since the traumatic brain injury that had rewritten his life—that a high-stress, life-or-death situation hadn’t triggered the fog.
“It was like working a rig on a forward deployment. The second I got my hands on the iron, my brain just mapped it out. The release valves, the pins, the physics of the jam. Even when my boot slipped… I just knew what to do. I never missed a step.”
For the first time all night, the tight, terrified lines of Kat’s face softened. A wobbly, beautiful smile touched the corners of her mouth. Once again, she rested her forehead against his shoulder. “Muscle memory,” she muttered warmly against his shirt.
“Yeah.” Hanson breathed out, the tight knot that had made itself at home in his chest miraculously loosened.
“Muscle memory.” He let himself savor the victory for one more second—just him, the girl in his arms, and the quiet triumph of his own mind working exactly the way it was supposed to.
Then, the protective instinct that had driven him up the wheel in the first place kicked back in.
He gently eased back, though he kept one arm firmly wrapped around her waist. “Clint?”
Her expression shifted into something warmer and less complicated.
“Stable. Ambulance already gone. Doc Conroy followed.” She settled back against his shoulder like she’d decided that was where she was staying for the foreseeable future and he had no objections whatsoever.
“Sarah Sue says her father is very optimistic.”
He let that land. Let the relief of it move through him. “And Alice?”
“With Preston.” A pause. “Doc let her talk to Clint on her cell as soon as they were on their way. You know Alice, making sure you were okay before she left for the hospital was…well… she’s Alice.”
He almost smiled. “Yeah.”
Above them the Ferris wheel stood motionless and entirely unbothered by the afternoon it had caused, its red paint catching the late afternoon light with the cheerful indifference of carnival equipment everywhere.
The teenage operator was talking to two men in what appeared to be official fair committee vests, his posture carrying the particular energy of someone providing a very detailed account of events they had not been fully prepared for.
“For what it’s worth,” Kat remained tucked into his shoulder, “I would not object to going the rest of my life without watching you do that again.”
“Reasonable.”
“I counted five seconds.”
“I know.”
“It felt like considerably more than five seconds.”
“I know that too.” He pressed his lips to her hair again, briefly. “I had the lanyard.”
“I know you had the lanyard.” A pause. “I was still counting.”
He held her a little tighter. She let him.
Somewhere across the grounds a cheer went up—probably the cornhole tournament resuming, or someone’s livestock placing, or simply Honeysuckle deciding the afternoon had been eventful enough and it was time to get back to the business of being a county fair.
Standing in the middle of it with his boots on solid ground and Kat in his arms, it occurred to Hanson that all things considered, this was a very good place to be.