Claire caught Harper’s eyes, and Harper caught hers. Across the noise and the wind, they looked at each other, and Claire thought about the porch and the napkin and how they were never going to back out.
Cal walked her to the edge. Claire’s feet were at the door, and below her, the earth was impossibly far away. She crossed her arms. She leaned back.
And she fell.
The first second was pure silence. Absolute silence, like the world had taken a deep breath and just held it. Then the wind hit, and the silence became a loud roar.
Claire Morrison was falling through the sky above Beaufort, South Carolina, and she was screaming.
Screaming the way she hadn’t screamed in many years. Not a polite, controlled scream, not the kind of scream from a woman who counted to three, but a real, primal scream that came from a deep place, from the unmanaged part of herself.
The Lowcountry spiraled below her. She could see the rivers, threads of green, bridges, marshes, the ocean beyond. She could see the sky above and the earth below, and she was in between, suspended in absolutely nothing, held by nothing except a man named Cal and a harness that she desperately hoped was made well.
And she was being held by the blind, stupid, magnificent trust that the parachute would open and the ground would catch her, that she would survive all of this.
She refused to close her eyes.
The drogue chute deployed. The free fall slowed. Then the main canopy opened with a jolt, snapping her upright.
The roar became a whisper, and now she was floating, floating above her life.
The world below was silent and gorgeous, more beautiful than anything she’d ever seen.
And now she just hung in the sky and laughed.
No screams this time, just a laugh, the laugh of a woman who had just done the most terrifying thing she could imagine.
And on the other side of that terror was not safety, but something even better - a knowledge that she could survive anything, because she just had.
Harper jumped second. She walked to the door with Dez and looked down, and her brain did what her brain always did. It calculated. It ran numbers. It assessed risk and the probability of every possible outcome, then concluded that her body had already reached the conclusion that this was insane.
“Ready?” Dez asked.
“No,” Harper said. “Go.”
They fell.
The wind took everything. It stole her thoughts and her plans. It took away her quarterly projections and her corner office. It removed her 14th-floor view and her $200 million portfolio, and scattered them into the sky like confetti.
For the first time in her whole life, Harper Ellis was not in control of anything. She could not control the speed, the direction, or the outcome of what was about to happen. She was just a body in the air, subject to physics, the law of gravity, and subject to the terrifying reality that no amount of preparation could change what was happening to her, and that what was happening was that she was falling and that she couldn’t stop it.
She was silent.
Dez would later say to her that most people screamed or cried. One man even sang the national anthem, but Harper was silent the entire way down, eyes wide open.
She took in everything: the coastline, the curve of the earth, the blue, and the green. She’d been rushing through this world for fifty years without stopping to look at it, and now she had no choice.
She thought about Jordan and the workshop in Mount Pleasant. She thought about the sawdust on the floor and the table he was building her. She thought about the drawer, the fourth chair, and the coffee he made her with one sugar, and the fact that she was finally letting him do all of those things.
She thought about her mom, her cousin Margaux and her children, the tall divorced surgeon. She thought about the toast over the sink in her apartment with no kitchen table, and all the years she had spent building a life that looked perfect but felt empty.
I’m done with that, she thought to herself. I’m done with eating while I stand up. I’m done with keeping my options open so I don’t have to make hard choices. I choose this. I choose him. I choose the table, the drawer, and the mess of being known by someone who isn’t afraid of me.
The canopy opened, and the world went quiet.
She floated above the Lowcountry, completely still.
This must be what relaxation feels like.
