Chapter 10
“You cannot keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Carrying me.”
She looked at him.
He swallowed. “You shouldn’t have to.”
Something inside her tightened.
“No,” she said. “I should not.”
His eyes dropped.
Henrietta waited.
For perhaps the first time in their marriage, Calvin seemed unable to defend himself.
Then he said, “I was wrong about you.”
The storm continued around them as though nothing had happened.
Henrietta almost laughed.
Not from amusement.
From the absurdity of hearing the words here, on a mountainside, when every part of her was numb or aching and both of them could still be dead before dark.
“What a convenient hour to discover it,” she said.
“I know.”
“No, I do not think you do.”
“I thought—”
“You thought I was soft.”
He winced.
She continued. “You thought I was helpless. You thought because I am heavy and because my joints pain me, I must be weak.”
“I thought you had never done anything difficult in your life.”
Henrietta stared at him.
Calvin rubbed snow from his mouth. “That sounds worse aloud.”
“It was not attractive silently.”
“No.”
For once he did not argue.
He looked toward the faint dark line of the rock overhang. “Can you get there?”
“We can.”
“You.”
“We.”
His mouth tightened again, but the old arrogance had drained from the gesture.
“Henrietta, if you fall because of me—”
“I already nearly did.”
“If you die because of me.”
She stopped coiling the rope.
The fear in his eyes was naked now.
“You think I don’t understand what you’re risking?” he asked. “I do. I understand it very well.”
“Then help me.”
“How?”
“Stay conscious. Put your arm over my shoulders. Use your good leg when I tell you. Do not try to be noble, because you are very bad at it.”
He almost smiled.
“All right.”
They moved.
The fifty yards became a private war.
Henrietta tied the rope around Calvin’s waist and hers so that if one fell the other might at least have a chance to stop the slide. He leaned heavily across her shoulders. She bore him one staggering step at a time, angling sideways through knee-deep snow.
The cold entered her differently now.
Not as pain.
As absence.
Her fingers ceased to complain. Her toes disappeared. Her injured knee moved only because she watched it move and commanded it again.
Calvin noticed before she admitted it.