“Yeah.”
“Did you think I would forget you, my heart?” I was in pain. “Did you think I didn’t want you?”
“I…”
“Oh, my prince.” I pulled him closer and kissed his temple. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry,” I whispered. “Still married to you. Always will be.”
Daniel froze like a statue, unable to respond at all.
“Talk to me, Daniel.”
“Your ring… you don’t wear it. I assumed you…” He trailed off.
“I wore it! I wore it until one day it fucking broke.”
“Broke?”
“Yeah. During the Everest trip, it just disintegrated. It was made of PVC pipe, remember? I couldn’t even save any pieces.”
“Oh.”
I blew a long exhale. “I cried, you know?” I smiled at him ruefully. “When I realized I had lost the last part of you, I wept like a boy. My Everest crew had no idea. They thought I had lost my nerve.”
There was a flash of movement, then suddenly I was being kissed. Our helmets knocked, but Daniel grabbed my face and just went at it. It lasted only a few seconds before Daniel pulled back, but it rocked my world, and everything suddenly fell back into its correct place.
The radio crackled to life over our headsets. Waypoint’s station chief’s voice piped in. “ETA?”
Daniel was at the comms as my co-pilot, but he had his face in his hands. I couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind. He wasn’t one to collapse like that, but he carried the guilt and the grief much more than me. Few people understood just how deeply he felt everything.
I checked the instruments. “Thirty-three minutes, sir.”
“Copy that. Everything okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Radio when you’re there.”
“Will do.”
9
Reed
Daniel had recovered and was back to his calm-headed self. He looked out the window and stole glances at me between monitoring the radio and the flight path. Though he still looked the same, there was something about him that had changed in these past minutes.
I studied him, keeping my eyes on the horizon, but the weather was clear, and there was not much to do, so my attention kept drifting to his profile.
My chopper, an AS350 B3, had a stability augmentation system. It was a lightweight, maneuverable workhorse, and I loved flying it, but right then I loved it for other reasons. The small cockpit meant that Daniel had his knees touching mine and our shoulders pressed together. A bigger bird wouldn’t have had us this close to each other.
“Hey,” I said.
He turned his head to look at me. It hit me then what had changed about him. His eyes. It was like they had come to life. He was still the mild doctor behind his glasses, and maybe it wouldn’t be apparent to others, but my stomach flipped at the way his eyes shone with a deep inner joy.
“Why are you staring like that?” He tilted his head, a small smile playing on his lips.
The enormity of everything crashed down on me. The odds of meeting a man like Daniel in this lifetime, and then him actually returning my feelings, the effortless connection we shared, the impossible odds of finding him again in Antarctica, and realizing we had both never moved on. My breath came out in a shudder.
I had seen so much of life and death. My childhood was shaped by the Australian outback, the harsh reality of nature, the brutal summers, and the long winter months. My Pa was a station hand, just like his father and his father before him. Mustering cattle had taught me a lot about life and about myself.
