Corrigan saw what I was doing and came to life. “NO!” he roared. “No! Get out of there!”
By now I was wriggling between the front seats. I am not letting him die.
“BECKETT!”
I shoved my head and shoulders into the footwell. The movement made the car tip forward, sliding faster. “I can’t hold it!” yelled Sophie from behind me.
“BECKETT, GET OUT OF THERE!” Corrigan’s voice was raw and fractured.
My hands were shaking. The light from the flashlight was jerking and twitching as I panted, lighting up dirt and torn carpet and candy wrappers, twisted metal and—
There! Poking in through the mangled steel, a hand. I grabbed it and squeezed it.
The car lurched and tipped.
I saw the loop of orange fabric that was snagged. Slashed it free with my scalpel. The hand withdrew and was gone.
I twisted and climbed. As my shoulders pushed between the rear seats, it registered that I was climbing, clawing my way up a forty-five degree slope: the car had tipped right up and was going over. I kicked and twisted and scrambled, focusing on the open rear door and the moonlit forest that was moving horribly fast past it—
I fell out onto the snow, one arm and one leg hanging over the cliff. I rolled to safety as the car’s bumper slid almost silently past my head and the whole thing disappeared into the blackness. I looked around. Sophie was lying gasping in the snow. There were tire tracks where the car used to be. Nothing else.
A few heartbeats of total silence and then an almighty crash from below: shattering glass and tortured, screaming metal.
“Corrigan!” I clawed my way on my forearms to the edge, hoping, praying….
And looked down into his upturned face. For a few seconds, we just stared at each other. Then he got one hand up onto the cliff edge and I pulled and he heaved and he clambered up. As soon as he was there, he just grabbed me and rolled me into a full-body hug. He was on top of me and the whole of me was pressed against the whole of him, my face buried in the crook of his neck, his arms locked so tight around my back that it felt like he’d never let me go. I felt his words as hot rushes of air against the back of my neck. “That’s not what you do, Beckett! That’s not what you do, you eejit! You’re meant to be safe! Why did you do that?!”
I pulled back from him enough to look into his eyes. “Why do you want to die?” I searched his face for answers. “You’re good and a great doctor and I really like you!”
He stared at me and went silent. His eyes were imploring me not to do this, not to tempt him. I knew I was tearing him in two, but what was this blackness I was dragging him away from? What had hold of him so tightly that he was ready to let it drag him down to his death?
A noise shattered the silence. Distant and muffled by the snow, but recognizable: a car horn. The snow plow was here.
Corrigan got to his feet, his eyes never leaving mine. He reached down, grabbed my hand and hauled me up, but he didn’t let go of my hand. His strong fingers squeezed mine, over and over, and I could feel the tension all the way up his arm. He was a hair’s breadth from jerking me forward and kissing me. “Come on,” he said at last. “We have to get her down the hill.”
I nodded. But this wasn’t over and we both knew it. We couldn’t continue like this: the tension between us had ratcheted too high. Either he’d manage to break free of what was holding him back...or I’d lose him forever.
32
Amy
STRAPPED to the side of the medical bag was a folding backboard and we used it as a stretcher to carry Sophie. She’d passed out again, from the cold or the effort of helping save Corrigan, and her skin was frighteningly pale. Corrigan was right: we had to get her down the hill to the snow plow, now.
But carrying the stretcher through thigh-deep drifts was a frozen, heart-stopping hell. The snow was getting heavier and it blew into our faces, half-blinding us and numbing our skin. My scrubs were long-since soaked through and the snow felt as if it was pressing against my bare legs, turning my thighs and calves into lumps of concrete. I soon had no feeling in my feet and that made it impossible to get a sure footing. With the path twisting its way downhill, that led to some terrifying moments because, when one of us slipped, we didn’t have a hand free to stop ourselves. By halfway, my shoulders were on fire, my legs were screaming and my abdomen was burning from trying to stabilize me.