Page 158 of The Best Shot

I didn’t ask. Some things you don’t go picking at.

I called her once.

I should’ve known better.

I’d meant to keep it simple. Check in. Hear her voice. Let her hear mine. Hang up before either of us said anything we’d have to carry afterward.

Instead, I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone against my ear and listened to her try not to cry.

She told me she was fine. I asked how she really was.

“It’s dark here,” she said. “All the time now. I forgot what the sun looks like. I miss you.”

I didn’t have anything for that.

I couldn’t fix the sun. Couldn’t fix the cold or the dark or the distance.

She was freezing on the other side of the world, alone in the dark, and all I could do was sit in a warm house and listen to her breathe.

She needed me, and I was here.

I’d built a whole life around being where I was needed. The one time it counted, being here didn’t mean a damn thing.

“I know,” I said.

“That’s it? You know?”

I had more than that. All of it sitting right at the front of my mouth.

“I know,” I said again, quieter.

“Say something else.”

“Three more weeks, darlin’,” I said, because it was the only thing I had that was both true and good. “Christchurch. Your R&R. Three more weeks.”

A pause. “You remembered?”

“I remember everything you tell me, Yasmine.”

The line crackled over nine thousand miles of quiet, and the sound of her breath.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. If I stayed on the line another minute, I was going to say something I couldn’t take back over a bad connection to a woman who couldn’t do anything with it but ache.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

I ended the call and sat staring at the wall for a long time.

Then I opened the laptop and went back through her emails until I found the one about the penguins.

They huddle for warmth, she’d written. Thousands of them pressed together, rotating. The ones on the outside work their way in, and the ones who’ve been warm take a turn at the edge. Nobody freezes, because nobody has to stand out there alone the whole time.

Sounds miserable, I’d written back.

It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, she’d written.

I read it three times.