He gives me a discreet perusal, and I see him doing the thing, chewing on the inside of his cheek when he’s uncomfortable and trying to figure out how to fix something.
But instead of interrupting, he makes a quiet exit.
I stop him at the door.“Did you read this?”
“Yes.”He glances at the book and looks away, sliding his hands into his pockets.“Can I get you anything?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m here if you need me.”With that, he steps out.
I return to her journal, consumed by the memories and her surgical details.My eyes burn, and my neck aches from holding the same position for hours.
The pages keep turning.
At some point, the sentences shift, and her map begins to point at me.My detachment.My depression.She pins it down with the same brutal precision she uses on the worst of the Arctic.
The sky is turning the wrong shade.
The cold is so vicious it hates human skin.
Wolf grows withdrawn and distant.
When I reach the part I dreaded, her account of that day doesn’t deviate from my memories.
Frankie asleep by the fire, my brothers dealing with Denver’s body, the snowdrifts pushing against the walls of the cabin… I threatened to kill her on the cliff, and she knew I wouldn’t.But I still hurt her irreparably.
I left them to mourn and ration and freeze because my head told me the only clean escape was death.I told myself that leaving this world would save them from having to watch me fall apart.
What I did, as her journal shows without pity, was leave them to carry too much heartache and suffering alone.
I reread one sentence in particular, one she scribbled in a cramped, furious hand.
Every day, we count our breaths and keep one for Wolf.
Fuck, that hurts.
They never gave up on me.They looked for me.They waited for me.Theyhoped.
If survival is a story, Frankie’s just handed me the part where the martyr finds out he was a selfish cunt.
My face goes numb, and the tears come without ceremony.One, then another, followed by a steady drizzle that smears the pages.I let it.I let myself feel the thing I keep tucked away, the knowledge that I left my family to a frozen fate I knew they couldn’t survive.
I fucking left them.
If I could rewind, I wouldn’t jump.I’d stay.I’d be the brother shivering beside them in the dark, bitching about the last can of beans, and cracking sick jokes to distract their stomachs from twisting inside out.I would man up and choose to be there because love is harder than death.
I read the rest with an achy throat, and despite what I told her, I skip the sex stuff.That belongs to them, not me.I stick to the parts that hurt.The bear attack, the icy lake that swallows her, the SOS signal, every harrowing effort they make to survive.I inhale it all, knowing where I was during those ten months.
Was being tortured by Dr.Rhett Howell worse than the hell they suffered?I don’t know.
Physical pain aside, they weren’t alone.Through it all, they had one another.
And they had one more thing.
Hope.
Turns out that was the map out of hell.Who would’ve thought?
