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Rosemary speared a second bite. The chive and beef momo was delicious, although not quite as good as the fried dumplings Kal had ordered from the street vendor in Kathmandu.
Nikil cleared his throat. “I didn’t mean to be insensitive. If it’s too hard to talk about or something. How’s the food?”
“It’s fine,” Rosemary said. “Kal?”
“The salad’s always good.”
“I don’t think I’ve had that.” Nikil peered at Kal’s plate. “What’s it called?”
“It’s not on the menu.”
“Huh.”
Rosemary finished her momo.
The thing about being fully thirty-nine years old, and having survived a marriage in which she’d been given nothing she wanted save a lovely daughter whose upbringing had challenged and exhausted her for seventeen years—only to come out the other side of that marriage with wealth and experience—was that Rosemary didn’t have any trouble locating power.
True, her book wasn’t good. Yet.
True, Nikil wanted an avalanche story, and she didn’t intend to write him one.
That didn’t mean she had nothing to bargain with. She had a book contract, an interesting life, and a very good idea.
She let him dangle for another moment as she took a third bite of momo.
“I don’t have an avalanche story to tell you,” she said at last. “But I do think you’re right that the book I’ve been planning to write isn’t quite working.”
“You know what?
??s selling right now isn’t so much the women’s inspirational stuff, it’s more of the missing girl books, or the kid who’s got a dark secret and then the story’s all about how the mom figures it out and her life gets turned upside down.”
“I’m not sure that’s helpful.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” Nikil shoved a dumpling in his mouth.
“I’m not trying to write ‘women’s inspirational stuff,’?”—Rosemary made air quotes, just to see Nikil flinch—“so much as I’m trying to write about women, full stop. What it is to be a woman at present. What women are capable of.”
“That’s good, yeah.”
“Obviously, I can’t write about summiting Everest yet, because I haven’t done it, and won’t be able to for another year at least.”
The thought of returning to Base Camp in a year left her cold. But surely that feeling would fade, with time? She would rediscover her sense of purpose. All she had to do was carry on as though she hadn’t lost it on the side of a mountain in a devastating rush of snow. It was how bravery worked: it didn’t require one not to be afraid, only to act as though one wasn’t, and to keep acting that way until the fear subsided and one’s feelings began to align with one’s intentions.
“In the meantime,” Rosemary went on, “my publisher is expecting pages from me that will be suitable for publication in an outdoor magazine, and that’s where I think we need to strategize if we’re to avoid missing out on the opportunity to create advance interest in the book.”
Kal’s friend carried three steaming bowls of soup from the kitchen. The one she set down before Rosemary had a beef broth and wide, flat noodles. “Thank you. This looks delicious.”
“Welcome.” She gave Kal a different sort of soup, with translucent noodles. “You want sauce?” The woman had lovely skin and wide, innocent-looking eyes. Rosemary wondered if she and Kal had ever been an item.
“No, I like it like this.”
“Okay.”
She returned to her place behind the counter. Kal sprinkled his soup liberally with dried chilis from a jar in the middle of the table. Nikil did the same, then swallowed some broth and began blinking rapidly behind the thick frames of his glasses.
“I’d like to write about Yangchen Beckett,” Rosemary said.
Kal’s head came up. “She doesn’t give interviews.”
