Chapter 2 #2
Twenty years of putting people on horses had taught her one thing above everything else, which was that you never show a man the whole weather report. You tell him what he needs to turn around. You keep the rest.
She told herself that was why.
It would be months before she was willing to say the other reason out loud, which was that she already knew what she would do with an answer, and she did not want one yet.
"You lied to me in the hospital."
"Yes."
"You lied about an airplane."
"Yes."
"Why."
He was quiet for long enough that she almost hit him.
"Because you were in a bed with a tube in you," he said, "and if I had said I was home with Marin, you would have asked what Marin was doing at our house at four in the morning, and I would have had to answer it, and I didn't have the—" He stopped.
Started again. "I was going to tell you when you were stronger.
That's what I told myself. I have told myself that every day for six weeks and it got easier to say every single day and that is how I know exactly what kind of man I am. "
"You were going to tell me."
"I was going to tell you at Christmas."
"Christmas," Tess said.
"I know."
"You were going to let me get through Christmas first. That's—" She made a sound. "Do you hear it? That's a scheduling decision. That's you moving a meeting."
He didn't defend it. That was new. He sat on the stool that was too tall with his elbows on his knees and let her hit him with it, and did not once say but or you have to understand or it wasn't like that, and some cold part of Tess noted the change and filed it and did not trust it at all.
"Are you going to fire her?"
"Yes."
"Don't say it like that."
"Like what?"
"Like I asked you for a favor," Tess said. "Like it's something you're doing for me. I don't want a gift. I want to know what you're going to do."
He looked up.
"She's gone," he said. "Monday. It's not a favor and it's not for you and I'm not going to stand here and tell you it costs me nothing, because she runs my life and it's going to be a disaster for about a year. Monday."
Tess stood up.
"Where are you going?"
"Elkhorn."
"It's snowing over the divide."
"I've driven it worse than this."
"Tess." He was up now. "You are six weeks off a laparotomy and you cannot load that arm and the pass is—" He stopped himself, and she watched him do it, and it was the most decent thing he'd done all night.
"Okay. Do you want me to follow you up? I'll stay in the bunkhouse.
I'll stay in the truck. I'll stay wherever you want, I just don't want you up there by yourself. "
"No."
"Tess—"
"I've been by myself," she said. "I did it in October. I'm good at it now."
She went upstairs to pack and he did not follow her, which she noticed, and which she was grateful for, and which also made her angry, because six weeks ago he would have followed her.
She packed badly. Two shirts, no socks, the good coat, and then she stood in her own closet with her hand on the doorframe for a while and could not think of a single other thing she owned.
The room was very clean. The housekeeper had been Monday. The bed was made the way she never made it.
She got the bag down the stairs one-handed and he was at the bottom, waiting, and he took it from her without asking, and she let him.
"Will you text me when you get there."
"No."
"Okay."
"I'm not punishing you," she said, and found out as she said it that she wasn't sure. "I just don't want to have to think about it."
"Okay."
He carried the bag out to the truck and put it in the back seat and shut the door gently and stood in the driveway in the snow with no coat on and did not say anything else.
Then the gate, on her code, at 7:48 in the evening.
She got on I-70 and drove west into it.
The weather over the divide was nothing, Grady was right for once. It got serious past Silverthorne and then it let go entirely and by the time she came up onto the high country there was a moon out and the snow lay blue in the meadows on either side of the road.
She had a lot of time to think and she did not use it well.
She kept picking things up and putting them down.
Six weeks. Every night on the road, on the phone, to somebody else.
I told her things I hadn't told you. She had asked him at least a hundred times in twelve years what was wrong and he had said nothing and she had believed him, and it turned out that nothing had a phone number.
And under that, running the whole way like the road noise: I did not see those calls.
She wanted it to be true so badly that it frightened her.
She caught herself at it somewhere around Kremmling — caught herself building the case for him, laying out the reasons, arranging them like a person setting a table. Marin held the phone. Marin always held the phone. He'd have come.
And a colder voice underneath, the one she'd used for twenty years to decide whether to take people above treeline: you want it to be true, so slow down.
She did not slow down.
The last of it was the pass.
She hadn't been up it since. She had thought about that on the way and then had deliberately stopped thinking about it, and then there she was, coming down through the trees on the west side with the road bare and dry and salted and nothing about it dangerous at all.
The guardrail was new. That was the thing that got her. Sixty feet of fresh galvanized rail, bright as a nickel in the headlights, bolted in where the old one had gone, and past it the county had put down two reflective markers.
She didn't slow down for that either. She went by at fifty-five and looked straight ahead and felt her whole right side go tight, from the shoulder down through the scar, the way it did before weather.
Elkhorn was black when she got there. Three and a half hours door to door, and she did not remember much of the last one.
The house had been shut since October and it was thirty-eight degrees inside and smelled like cold stone and dust. She got the boiler lit on the second try.
She stood in the mudroom with her coat still on and waited for the pipes to start knocking, and somewhere in there, without any warning at all, she started to cry.
It was not about Marin. That was what surprised her.
She stood in her grandmother-in-law's ugly mudroom and cried like something had died and none of it was about a thirty-four-year-old woman with good shoes, and all of it was about a man sitting on a couch in a study thirty minutes from a hospital while somebody cut her open.
It went on a while. Then it stopped, the way it does.
She washed her face at the mudroom sink. She was thinking about whether there was anything in the house to eat and whether she'd left the good sleeping bag in the tack room, and she was almost steady.
Her phone lit up on the bench.
Porter.
She looked at it. Half past midnight. She thought about the seven calls and the gray letters underneath them, and she thought, clearly, in her own voice: let it ring.
She answered it on the first ring.
"Hey," she said.