Chapter 8
This time he was calculating.
Measuring what she had left.
“You should never have come,” he said.
“I am aware.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I.”
“You can’t haul me out with joints like that.”
Henrietta shifted her boot and nearly cried out. “Watch me.”
Something hardened in his expression. “That isn’t courage.”
“No?”
“No. It’s damned foolishness.”
Her temper flared hot enough to defeat the cold for one glorious moment. “You rode alone into a mountain storm after being warned the sky looked wrong.”
“That was different.”
“Because you are a man?”
“Because this ranch is my responsibility.”
“And what are you?”
His mouth closed.
Henrietta leaned closer, breathing hard. “What are you, Calvin Brooks? Are you not my responsibility at all? Am I permitted to mend your shirts, fix your accounts, bake your bread, sweep your floors, and sleep beneath your roof—but the moment your life requires something costly from me, I am to remember that I am not truly your wife?”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“It is what you have said every day since our wedding.”
The words seemed to strike the rock behind him.
Calvin stared at her.
Snow drifted between them.
Henrietta wished she could gather the sentence back. Not because it was undeserved, but because this was no place to expose the wound he had left in her. The ravine already had enough open things.
Calvin looked down.
“When I said that…”
“No.”
His head lifted.
“Do not explain now,” she said. “Climb.”
For once, he did not resist.
They resumed.
Henrietta discovered that pain had its own strange geography. At first it filled the knee. Then it climbed into the thigh, spread into the hip, and finally became so large she could no longer locate it. Her hands cramped around the rope. Her shoulders shook.
Calvin reached the broken shelf first.
He dragged himself over it with a sound somewhere between a grunt and a sob. Henrietta pushed until his hips cleared the edge, then lost her footing.
She fell.
The rope caught her violently.
Her body slammed against the slope.
“Henrietta!”
Calvin rolled onto his stomach and seized the rope with both hands.
She dangled below the shelf, cheek pressed against ice, lungs emptied by the impact.
“Henrietta, answer me!”
She tried.
No sound emerged.
“Henrietta!”
“I—am—here.”
The rope trembled.
“Can you climb?”
She flexed her knee.
Nothing.
Not pain.
Nothing.