It was always good to know the theory, but climbing was like swimming or driving, something you couldn’t learn entirely from a book. “If you’re nervous, you don’t have to come down. I might not know my knots, but I’ve done a lot of climbing, for roles.”
“Oh yes,The Precipice.”
He frowned. “I thought you said you didn’t know who I was until this week?”
“I didn’t!” She was blushing. A guilty conscience?
“The Precipicewas my biggest flop. Sank into obscurity within minutes of its release. I wouldn’t expect someone who didn’t know who I was to be familiar with it.”
“I … googled you?”
He crossed his arms. Her tone suggested she was lying, but why? In his head, his mom’s warning tolled:Never get close to the normies.
“After the cop identified you in the photo with Vivien,” she continued, “I wanted to find out if you were…”
He could have offered a word. Sketchy? Shady? But he didn’t want to let her off so lightly, in case this really was an elaborate stalker ploy. Here he was, about to climb down a gully in the middle of nowhere, on the basis of a pretty stranger’s sob story. What would his mom say to that?
“You showed the cop my picture?” he said.
“He laughed and told me who you were. Anyway,” she declared, as if the question overThe Precipicewas resolved—and in his mind, it was not. She was withholding crucial details. He could see it in the way she averted her eyes, in the hint of panic there. “It’s not the climbing I’m worried about—I haven’t thought enough about it to get worried. It’s…” She swallowed.
It was what she might find at the bottom.
“Why don’t you stay here? I’ll go down.”
She shook her head. “She’s mysister.”
Griffin didn’t have a sister or a brother, but he’d once had a friend who was the next best thing. He could read the pain in Lana’s eyes—or maybe he was just feeling his own, old regrets. He instinctively went to touch her shoulder but pulled back. You definitely never touched the normies. Most people he got a solid read from in seconds. This woman? She was contradictory. And sure, most people were once you looked closely. A good actor could fake the catch in her voice, even the glassiness in her eyes. But her body language didn’t lie—the way she seemed on the brink of breaking when she spoke of her sister but visibly reassembled, a hundred micro-movements rolling up from her spine to her jaw to her eyes. The nervous twitch at the side of her mouth, there and gone in a split second. The way she mostly maintained eye contact, as if she were okay with him seeing into her soul, but then whipped away her gaze if she felt him getting too close to … something. The way her skin was a barometer—pale one moment, flushed the next. Those were subconscious movements, hard to fake. She was either a brilliant actor who should be in the next Christopher Nolan film, or she was telling the truth—except when she was blatantly lying. Huh.
“Who did you lose?” she said suddenly.
“Sorry, what?”
“You said you knew what it was like to lose someone.”
She’d googled him, and didn’t know that? Griffin never googled himself, because nothing good came of knowing what people said about you, but he imagined that incident would popup. When your famous best buddy overdoses next to you and you’re too far gone to even call an ambulance, it tends to get mentioned. “I don’t talk about it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” It wasn’t clear if she was apologizing for his loss or for bringing it up, but either way, she meant it.
“Let’s do this, before we lose the light.”
The first part was simple enough—the sandstone formed natural steps—but it would get tricky as the rock morphed into smoother granite. Lana clung to the rope, relying on it too much. A minute or two in, she almost swung off the side of a block of rock and he had to catch her around the waist. He let go the second she found her balance, but they were left fighting for space with a small tree growing horizontally from a fissure. He could smell her perfume, soft and floral.
“Don’t overthink it,” he said. “It’s notCliffhanger.”
She looked at him blankly.
“Sylvester Stallone?”
She opened and closed her mouth, on the verge of a confession. “I don’t watch movies.”
“At all?”
“I’ve seen one or two, but I never really got into them.”
“One or two … this year?”
“One or two, ever. I mean, not literally ‘one or two,’ obviously,” she conceded, reading the shock on his face. “I’m being hyperbolic. I really mean five or six? Though that was before last weekend, when I… Okay, maybe a dozen, tops.”
