Completely (New York 3)
Page 26
“Perfect.”
He shook his head and plucked the last dumpling off the plate. “You’re a piece of work, princess.” He dipped it in the sauce.
“Is that good or bad?”
“I’m not sure I know yet.” He met her eyes. “You look better. You feel better?”
“Yes, I think so. I don’t want to put my head down on the table anymore.”
“You’ve got some color back.”
“Are you thinking about it?” she blurted. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“The avalanche?”
She nodded.
“I never stop thinking about it.”
It was true. He never did.
He never stopped thinking about the Khumbu, the Sherpa people, Everest. He never stopped thinking about Brian, and wasted resources, and bodies on the mountain, the destruction he’d seen after the earthquake, the people he’d promised a livelihood to and then failed to deliver.
He never stopped thinking about his mom and what they’d gone through together. The awful day in the courtroom when the judge granted her divorce after Merlin got himself arrested for contempt. And that bloody afternoon at Base Camp when Merlin died and she’d turned around the next morning and hiked up the mountain to summit. How fiercely he’d wanted to protect her. How helpless he’d been to do anything but wait for her to come back.
It seemed perverse that he couldn’t just leave it all behind. Let the past be dead, move on with something else.
Even more perverse, how it had been good—really good—to see Brian’s face again.
Rosemary poked her index finger into the crumbs on their plate and ate them, one after another.
After a while, Kal stood, stretched, and gathered up his bag of clothes and her travel wallet. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I always thought you would have made it to the summit.”
Rosemary looked pleased.
He didn’t tell her his opinion was worth next to nothing.
Chapter 7
Kal picked up the in-flight magazine, skimmed through it, and set it down.
Then he retrieved the remote from where he’d left it on a table and flipped through the channels on the wall-mounted flat-screen monitor. One showed the airplane, an icon following a red arc from Abu Dhabi to New York City. The next three were live feeds from cameras mounted outside the plane—lights flashing in the darkness, now that they were high in the air and the sun had dropped below the horizon. After that, sitcoms captioned in multiple languages. Music videos, dancers whirling and singing. Hollywood movies.
He kept flipping, though he’d done this twenty minutes ago and found nothing to settle on after three minutes of news coverage had tipped him over sideways.
Nineteen deaths and counting in the avalanche. The journalist hadn’t said whether that included Sherpa people. It usually didn’t.
Kal couldn’t settle.
From Kathmandu to Abu Dhabi, he’d sat with Rosemary in first class. It was a normal plane, the kind of experience that wasn’t difficult to take in even though he’d never flown first class before. He enjoyed the free cocktail and rehydrated with four glasses of ice water. Rosemary fell asleep, but Kal watched out the window as they left Nepal behind, crossed India and Pakistan, and sliced over the Persian Gulf to land in the UAE.
Abu Dhabi to JFK was something else entirely.
He shouldn’t have let Rosemary purchase their tickets without talking to him first. If he’d had any idea she was going to spring for first-class apartments on this flight, he’d have insisted she put him in economy where he belonged.
What did it even cost to fly like this, with your own sliding doors shutting you away from the other passengers, your own leather seat big enough to fit four people, a foldout bed, a chef whipping up gourmet meals you selected from the menu whenever you took the whim to eat them, a signed welcome note from the cabin manager accompanied by hot towels and a bowl of dates?
He’d have to draw against every penny of his paltry credit limit to pay Rosemary back. Kal wasn’t sure it would even be enough—and that was if he could get her to say what he owed her, which seemed doubtful given that she turned into Fort Knox every time he brought it up.