“Hey, come sit over here,” Harrison called to her. “You need to sign the registry.”
She put her phone away, carefully negotiating her way across the jumble of rock that was the mountain’s highest point. “What’s that?”
“All the major peaks in Colorado have registries. When you make it to the top, you write in your name, the date, and a little bit about your climbing party.”
She sat on a rounded stone beside him. “Okay.”
He handed her a steel canister. “Open it up. The registry’s inside.”
She unscrewed the top and tipped it into her palm. Out came a tattered, rolled-up paper scroll of sorts and a small velvet box. “I wonder what that is.”
“Open it.”
Something in the tone of his voice drew her gaze to his. “Harrison?”
“Go on.”
She lifted back the top—and stared. “Oh!”
A glittering oval diamond nestled in white gold stared back at her.
She looked up, stunned, to find Harrison on one knee.
“There are probably a lot of reasons you shouldn’t marry me. I go away for long periods of time. My job is really dangerous. I do my best to be safe, but you know only too well that anything can happen.”
“Dude, you’re not really selling it,” a man’s voice said.
Kenzie hadn’t realized that everyone else on the summit had stopped what they were doing to watch and listen—and film this with their cellphones.
Harrison ignored the guy. “But I promise you that I’ll always do everything I can to get home to you.Youare my highest height, Kenzie. Without you, nothing I’ve done and nothing I will ever do even matters.”
Tears blurred her vision, happiness giving her heart wings. “Of course, I’ll marry you. Did you even think for a moment I might say no?”
As he slid the ring onto her finger, the summit of Mt. Sneffels at 14,150 feet above sea level, exploded into cheers.
* * *
Ten months later
Kenzie satin the Ops Room with the others, waiting for her phone to ring, Gizmo and Gabby napping near her feet. For days now, she’d barely been able to breathe. Harrison was pushing for the last summit today and far beyond the ability of anyone to help him should something go wrong.
She’d told herself to get used to this—the helplessness, the anxiety. This wasn’t the only time in her life when she’d be waiting and wondering whether her husband was still alive. She’d signed on for this when she’d fallen in love with him. But that didn’t make the waiting or the worrying any easier.
“This is the hardest part,” said Joanie, Bruce’s widow.
When she’d heard what Harrison was attempting and why he was doing it, she’d contacted Kenzie and the two had become good friends. She’d flown all the way from Perth with her two sons, Richard and James, to be here with Kenzie. The boys were outside, playing on one of Hawke’s fire engines under Brandon Silver’s supervision.
Laurie, Harrison’s mother, glanced at her watch again. “I used to send him away with his father in a bush plane and then spend the entire summer wondering whether I’d see him again.”
“That would be hard for a mum,” Joanie said.
Harrison and his mother had mended their fences, and she’d come to be a support for Kenzie—and to get to know her new daughter-in-law.
Everyone else in the Ops Room was ready for a celebration. Team members stood around, talking and joking, checking gear. Fruit and veggie trays sat on the meeting table with several pizzas, while soda and beer chilled in whiskey barrels of ice. There were bottles of champagne in the fridge, too, ready to be opened at the big moment when Harrison called from the summit of Lhotse.
He’d summited Nuptse three days ago and Everest yesterday, calling Kenzie from their summits to let her know he was okay and to tell her he loved her. He had sounded strong and in good spirits, which had been a relief. But the moment she’d hung up the phone, Kenzie had gone back to worrying.
His plan had been to push himself through the night, resting below the Death Zone of 26,000 feet only long enough to eat and recover before moving on again. He’d been expected to summit Lhotse a few hours ago.
